The Post Office

On my days off, I take the opportunity to visit the Post Office – seeing as its opening hours are incompatible with full-time employment.

While I’m queuing, I tend to fantasize about the end of the world. I project seven years into the future, following a nuclear war between Ecuador and Tesco. The denizens of the post office, who, after seven years, have finally reached the front of the queue, are the only humans left. By queuing, and remaining indoors, for so long, they manage to avoid the fallout, and venture into the wasteland only once radiation has fallen to safe background levels. It would be one of life’s ironies that their letters would never be delivered, despite queuing for so long; all postmen, and, indeed, the recipients of their letters, were reduced to dust, limbs twisting in blinding light as they conceded that ‘every little helps.’

And then my mind turns to survival. The sole inhabitants of the rest of the world consist of three pensioners, two cashiers, and a large, rugby-playing type. I reckon I could fight the pensioners off if I needed to secure food, and make a mental note to be extra-friendly to the cashier. Who knows, he might share?

Would we repopulate the Earth? Why would we want to repopulate the Earth? Before the crisis, young couples rejected the idea of raising children in Dagenham. I wouldn’t want to raise a child in a post-apocalyptic wasteland – for one thing, there are a considerably larger number of sharp edges, unburied corpses, and gangs of looters. Also, there are hardly any well-staffed C of E schools.

Just as I'm deciding which one of the three pensioners, two cashiers, and large, rugby-playing type I would choose as my post-apocalyptic mate, and ethereal voice interrupts.

"Cashier number four, please."