Thank god there is choice!

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

If you really want to experience infinity, you don’t have to follow Blake, all you have to do is go to a Post Office.

If you are ever homesick when in foreign parts, the solution is simple: visit a Post Office. The frustration of dead time; the sense of futility; the teeth gnashingly slow turnover – all are depressingly familiar to anyone anywhere in the world. You soon feel right at home!

There is a confraternity of Post Office workers whose code states that they must keep people waiting for as long as possible just short of a riot. Another part of the code outlines working conditions for public observation. No more than 10% of the visible workforce must actually be seen ‘serving’ the public. The other 90% must wander about looking officious but actually doing nothing. Anyone not a Post Office worker must be ignored with extreme prejudice.

Time has a different meaning when waiting at a Post Office counter. Like dogs’ lives, but in reverse, time slows down. One minute in the real world becomes seven in any Post Office. A normal Post Office is nearer to Jean Paul Sartre’s idea of hell than anywhere else that I know.

It took me more time that I thought humanly possible to post my parcel to Aunt Bet. This inordinate time delay was made possible by the prevarication of a languid Argentinean who leaned against the counter and challenged his counter assistant, while taking up the serving position and, as far as I could gather from the increasingly perplexed expression of the assistant, pointlessly wasted his time. Even the inevitable photocopying of the passport achieved nothing. The bloody man even had the gall to smile at the queue which was vibrating with hardly suppressed fury as he sashayed his way out!

I felt that I deserved a meal in town after that so, in spite of previous experience, I decided to try and understand the unaccountable popularity of the restaurant Lancaster Club at C/Mayor No 5, Castelldefels.

I suppose that entering an empty restaurant with the smell of toilet cleaner permeating the eating area should have given me pause for thought; but, ever an optimist I decided to risk the menu del dia.

The fideuá became the only dish that I have sent back since I arrived in Spain. It was supposed to be with prawns, but they looked more like shrunken, blackened homunculi than anything else. The dish was so salty that I expected careless use of the fork to cause the whole thing to crystallize. When it came back it looked and tasted as if it had been washed in hot water to reduce its potent saline content. My request for aioli was treated with surprise and it only arrived as I was eating my last mouthful!

The delay in getting me eating allowed me to study my slowly arriving fellow customers. The one sitting opposite me was the sort of young executive derided by John Betjeman. He was scarcely more than a boy in an ill fitting suit with a red shirt and a yellow tie and trainers. As soon as he took his jacket off you could see his pocket turned inside out, which I found oddly sad. As he was eating by himself he ‘talked’ on his phone – though when his meal arrived he put the phone down at the side of his plate without visibly turning it off. Bless!

Meanwhile the horror of my meal was not over. The botifarra (to which, surely, they could do no harm) was salty –but the beans, at last, were edible. The cheese cake which followed also tasted slightly salty, but that could have been my quite justifiable paranoia by that point.

The true highpoint of awfulness was that I couldn’t finish my cortado because the coffee was undrinkable. Now that, in Spain, is a real achievement!

The wait for the food was unacceptable, but then so was the food – though in all fairness the service was well meaning and cheerful. But you can’t eat service! I think that my patience is now finally exhausted with Lancaster Club. A restaurant to miss, I think.

I now have to take a photograph of the new figures in my Belén and send it to the Pauls so that Haydn can look at it and decide if he wants me to buy some for him.

I live a complex, technological life! Still I can always return to reality by gazing at the evening sun!