I
had been threatening to move but it seems that I just can’t tear myself away
from Shepherd’s Bush. And who can blame me? Of all the Bushes that people live
in it is surely the second best one, after the Australian Bush. Though where’s their Sainsbury’s Local and
Esquires coffee shop? Nowhere that’s where!
It’s
the eccentrics that I love, like the man who stands in the middle of the
Uxbridge Road on a Saturday afternoon, playing music, festooned in flags, dancing
and waving to the passing (usually gridlocked) motorists. But he’s by no means
the only one.
Last
week, on my wife’s birthday, we were going out for breakfast and passed a
cartoonish man with thick spectacles and brightly coloured clothes, driving the
wrong way up the road on his mobility scooter, which decorated with bunting and
cuddly toys. He gave us a cheery greeting and we all laughed together. So I was
a bit terrified when I turned to carry on to see the exact same man driving
towards me again. How was this possible? My initial thought was that there was a glitch
in the Matrix and I did a literal double-take to check and saw that the first
man was still there.
Of
course he was and the (some would say) more likely explanation that the pair
were twins proved to be the case. But
twins in late middle-age on mobility scooters and dressed in identical clothes
like they’d come out of an even more twisted Alice in Wonderland. The second
man was just as cheery as the first.
It
was as if I had hired a mobility-scooter-o-gram to celebrate my wife’s birth.
And of course I pretended I had. Because no one could believe such a thing
could happen by happenstance.
And
the magnet that keeps the Great British eccentrics safely within the orbit of
Shepherd’s Bush Green is the Post Office. I have written a couple of columns
about the batspit crazy buffoons and murderous crackpots that I have
encountered in there. I used to regularly tweet about the tortuous long waiting
times and strange things I had witnessed in the queue and the diligence and
patience of the staff. I don’t know how they cope in their stressful job
without punching everyone in the face. But they don’t punch anyone in the face and remain polite and
friendly in the face of madness and hostility.
Even
more impressively, in the last couple of years, the new manager has made the
place run so efficiently that I barely have the chance to tweet. Once it took
over 30 minutes to get to the front of the line, but now you’re seen usually
within seconds.
So
of course, having turned this place into a success, the Post Office want to
shut it down and move the operation to a much less central and less accessible
WH Smiths. Smiths are probably thinking of the extra money, but they do not
realise that their store will now act like a lighthouse, drawing in the
idiosyncratic Bush moths, who won’t spend any money in the store and will NEVER
LEAVE!
So
I send this message out to Ian Post Office (the head of the organisation that
bears his name): Please don’t penalise the good people of the world’s second
greatest bush or the amazing staff who have turned a dogspit store into a
flagship store. Leave our post office where it is.
Because
if the force that keeps the Bush people here is taken from us, the rest of you
will have to deal with them.
Never meet your heroes? Balderdash. On Monday I interviewed Dawn French for my Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (online Christmas week). She is just as lovely, funny and naughty in real life as you’d imagine. And she actually likes and respects her double act partner. What kind of a monster is she? Next Monday I am interviewing Tony Robinson from Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (I think he might have been in Blackadder too). Come along!
