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.

Buying stamps at the Post Office

In the UK, in my youth, Post Offices were like Government outposts. They were a place to cash your dole giro, sort out your passport, renew your driving licence, buy road tax or get a postal order. You could even post a letter there. I suspect that, nowadays, lots of young people hardly ever enter a Post Office. In Spain the Post Offices have never had the same import as they once did in the UK but, for me at least, they are still one of the places to send and receive cards, letters and packets. 

At the start of each year the stamp prices go up in Spain. Quite a steep rise this year. The price to send a letter or card depends on the size and shape of the envelope as well as the weight. In fact I only really use the post for birthday and Christmas cards and as cards almost always come in non standard sizes (C5 and DL are considered standard) with jolly red or green envelopes I get charged the "non normalised" rate even though the weight is under the 20g limit. The cost of a normalised national stamp is 75c or 85c for the non normalised. For stuff to the UK and most of Europe it's 1.65€ and 1.95€.

The queue in the Pinoso Post Office is usually enough to put off anyone who doesn't have serious business at the counter. For that reason I generally buy my stamps from the only other place they are on sale, in the licensed tobacconists, the estancos. This morning though as I passed the Post Office with my first card of the new year to post there was no queue so I went in. I asked for 10 stamps at 1.95€. As I half expected I was told that no such stamp existed. OK then I'll have 10 at 1.85€ (obviously as that's the  "base rate" European international stamp, it would be available) and 10 for 10 cents please. I was told that they had neither. The conversation went on for a while longer. I asked what smaller stamps they sold so that stamps could be combined to make up the required postage. Basically the answer was none. In fact they weren't keen to sell me stamps at all. They want you stand in their queue so that they can print out a sticker of the required value presumably to avoid under stamped letters. This is, after all, the same Post Office that bricked up the post box outside their building so that it's only possible to post a letter when the office is open. By now the stamp conversation had become a little tense. I was a tad annoyed. I raised my voice. That might have been the reason they magicked up some sort of presentation packs of 5 stamps that don't show a cash value but are printed with the letters A and B instead. The A type are for normalised, under 20g national stamps. The type B are for international. Heaven knows why they didn't offer me those at the start.

I've said before that Post Office queues are only rivalled in lentitude by bank queues. The banks have been getting it in the neck from a campaign mounted by older people against the withdrawal of counter services. It's not just rural areas that have lost banks. Several branches have closed in the cities too partly because of the myriad bank mergers and partly because of the growth of online banking services. Banks, strapped for cash a couple of years ago, their obscene profits at times wobbling into losses, went for the easy target of people like you and me. They introduced substantial maintenance charges as well as charging for basic services, like cash withdrawal from machines. There are even fees for using counter services. Even if you were happy to go through the hassle of changing banks to avoid these charges you'd often find that, behind the headline "No Commission" banner, there were hidden charges for everyday transactions. Even at the counters there were limitations on what sort of operations could be carried out at what times. 

Many older Spanish people still have bank books. If the hole in the wall wouldn't accept their book they would queue for counter services only to be told that there was a charge for whatever service they wanted. Sometimes they were told that whatever they wanted to do couldn't be done at that time or that they would need to telephone for an appointment. Under the slogan of "Soy mayor, no idiota" or I'm old not an idiot, a 78 year old retired doctor collected signatures, via change dot org, to try to force the banks to look after their customers better. On the day that he went to Madrid to hand over his petition he literally bumped into a Government Minister coming out of the same building. She made the right sort of supportive sounds as the press cameras clicked away. The day after the Santander Bank announced that it would be extending its opening times.

Maybe I should think of a campaign to demand satisfaction from Post Offices. I'm old but you're idiots perhaps?

Stamping the Christmas cards

I went to the Post Office to buy some stamps for my Christmas cards but there was a big queue. Now it can take fifteen minutes for Enrique, the guy on the Post Office counter, to shift two people so five or six people and I thought maybe I should carry food. Alternatively I could go to a tobacconist and buy the stamps there. I chose the second option.

In Spain there is a price for normal mail and a different price for what must be classed as abnormal mail. I mentioned this to the woman selling me the stamps in the tobacconist. She thought it was so much nonsense and limited herself to selling me stamps at 42c for national delivery and 90c for stuff to the rest of Europe. The other side of the world cost just 10c more.

I wrote my cards but before I stuck on the stamps I checked what constituted normal and abnormal mail. The price differential was substantial and most of my cards were definitely abnormal. Being an honest sort of bloke I thought the best bet was to explain myself to Enrique and use my tobacconist stamps plus extras from the Post Office to make up the difference. All I had to do was to find a time when the Post Office was empty.

Being old and stupid I forgot to take the stamps with me when I went in to the Post Office very early one morning so I ended up buying all the stamps there.

Maggie was writing her cards after I'd done mine. I offered her my unused stamps. She wrote her cards and started sticking stamps. She asked me about a stamp for sending a card within Spain. It was then I realised that she had put the national stamps on all the internationally addressed cards.

She hadn't recognised the Christmas tree design in the photo above as a sheet of six stamps. "I thought it was more useless Christmas information you'd brought home," she said. I laughed like a drain.