1: Routines around post

I suppose, wherever you live, life is full of routine. Depending on your luck those routines might be simple and safe or be hard and even life threatening. Mine are the soft routines of a relatively well off Western European. It's stretching a point to say that these routines are conditioned by living in Spain but that's the premise I'm starting from. I'm sure I'd never have noticed if I hadn't been racking my brains for something to blog about. So, this is the first, with more to come, about the most mundane of some of my weekly tasks.

Usually, when I make my weekly trip to the post office there is nothing in our PO box. When we first got here, things we knew had been posted to us used to go astray. The delivery to our rural address was haphazard at best and non existent in reality. That's why we rented a post office box, un apartado de correos. Renting the box for a year in 2005 cost less than 50€; the last time I renewed it the price was 85€.

We get almost no mail. If junk mail is a thing in Spain, it's the stuff that gets delivered in armfuls directly to the blocks of flats by repartidores, hand delivery. I've heard lots of explanations about why postal services never became as important here as they were in the UK, from high illiteracy rates and rural isolation through to the way that families tended to stay in the same place from birth to death. Also, and this is my theory, the post offices never got that extra push that the British ones have because they are a sort of outpost of government -  a place to renew car tax, pick up your pension or apply for a passport. That sort of role, to a much lesser degree, was taken here by the estancos, the tobacconists. 

To most Briton's minds the fact that Spanish post offices do not have a posting box verges on the bizarre. In our local office they removed the posting box from the wall and now there is a cardboard box on the floor if you want to post a letter when the office is open. The post office people seem to want you to go in. Getting to the counter in our local post office requires plenty of time and a lot of patience. For reasons too labyrinthine to go in to they are loathe to sell you multiple stamps or even stamps. In order to avoid the queue I go to an estanco, a tobacconist, and buy stamps there. I always try to overstamp the letters and cards I do send, just to be sure, and, if the post office is closed I post them in one of the two (I think) remaining pillar boxes in the town. There are others in the outlying villages but, the last time I used one, the letter took eight weeks to arrive.