Postscript

CHERYL Clark's Post Office name badge is clipped - the wrong way round - to a grey teddy bear behind the counter.

Cheryl, you see, doesn't need it. Her name is known because she's known, not because a name badge says so. I know, because I counted. Of her first 25 customers yesterday, every one called her Cheryl. Every single one. This, like the adverts want, is the people's Post Office.

Except the people's Post Office is closing these people's post office. More than 4,000 signed a petition to keep it open, more than 100 protested outside. It is popular and profitable. Yet, in September, it will close. A head office poster glibly declares: "Post Office Ltd would like to thank all respondents for their input, which provided us with detailed local knowledge to factor into our decision making process for the Cleveland with South Durham and Richmond area plan." Yeah, right.

Factor this. "I think the decision to close this Post Office was taken before any consultation - I'm sure of it," says customer Audrey Clough. Or stakeholder Audrey Clough, as the Post Office Ltd doubtless knows her. "We wrote to the Post Office Ltd and destroyed their arguments. All of them, destroyed. I think all our correspondence went on the shelf, or in the shredder. The nearest branch is the town centre, or the trading estate. It's too far. I am extremely angry - and it's not just me. It's the whole of Simpasture."

Mrs Clough pulls out a letter she sent to the Post Office Ltd, and their facile, insipid response: "I would like to assure you all the points that you have highlighted have been recorded," they wrote. "For further information visit www.postoffice.co.uk"

Simpasture Post Office, Newton Aycliffe, is on a shopping parade between a hairdresser's, tanning salon, butcher's and baker's, chippy and newsagent's. There's sheltered accommodation opposite, an overgrown green and a pub, the Iron Horse, nearby. It's a mile from the town centre.

The post office is at the back of a shop that sells everything from prunes to puncture repair kits, Rich Tea to reporter's notebooks. (Very useful, incidentally, for reporters who arrive ten minutes late, in a flap, without their notebook. Believe me.) At 9.10am, I'd missed the first queue of the day. By 9.20am, it was back.

The first customer wants to send a parcel to Richmond. "First or second class?" Cheryl asks.

"They employ dodos at the weekend, so I'd better go first." The second is sending clutch bags she's sold on eBay. Throughout the day, there are people sending letters, people sending parcels, people paying gas bills and people - lots of people - withdrawing money.

"I think it's disgusting," says Mildred Strevens, 75, from the nearby sheltered accommodation. "All the old people round here - it's not on closing it. I'll have to get the bus or a taxi to the town centre and wait in their queue. Sometimes there are just two people working there. With this closing, it will be even worse. I'd like to see Gordon Brown queuing for an hour - that might just surprise him. They get their salary and they're not bothered about anyone else."

Every customer is angry. And it's not anger whipped up for the papers, or anger prompted by a picture-hungry politician. It's proper anger and - more pertinently - proper disillusionment at the sham consultation.

"I think it's stupid," says Ken Wise, 68. "We have got to think of people, not just money. The old people who come here, they can hardly walk. Now they'll have to go to the town centre. It's stupid."

When there's not a queue, Cheryl chats to customers about their kids, or their mam, or - more often - the closure. Some stay ten minutes, putting the world to rights while putting their purse away.

Forget Westlife, and Joan Collins - they should film the adverts here. Warmer, funnier and, most importantly, cheaper.

The community will live without the post office, but it will be weaker. These people will have one less conversation, one less gossip. The post office natter reflects the community and shapes it, too. The bosses should stand here one morning: watching, listening, learning. The input might factor their decision-making process.

Cheryl, 51, and her husband Maurice, 55, bought the shop two years ago. It will survive without the Post Office - the accountant told them so - but there will be a gap, literally and figuratively. "We've asked the customers what to put here instead of the post office," says Cheryl. "One of them suggested pole dancing. That would be interesting."

They were told their branch was threatened in November; it was made public in February. The impassioned campaign, led by a steering committee, couldn't save it. "I have lived round here for 50 years, me and my husband - if I don't know the customers, I get to know them," she says. "It's busy here, but we always take the time to say How are you doing?' It takes nothing, but I'd rather that than pressing buttons, saying Here's your money'.

That's not the right attitude."

ONE criterion for closing, I'm told, is lack of wheelchair access. With that, a man in a wheelchair enters, no bother at all. He, of course, knows Cheryl. "Everyone is so upset at the closure," she says. "It doesn't bear thinking about.

They should have me up in the House of Commons.

I would have gone on the warpath."

"In town, there're only two serving, there's always a queue, and all you get is Number seven please', or Number five please'," says Carol Poole, 61. "I'm disabled myself. I live round the corner and it won't be the same. It just won't be the same."

Intrigued, I pop to the town centre post office before leaving Newton Aycliffe. The queue is sixstrong and it's fine. But there's less socialising, less spirit, and less Cheryl. Compared to Simpasture, it seems centralised, big and bland. Like much of modern life, really.

■ According to the Government, three in four post offices lose money and the network loses £4m a day.

But, to Cheryl, Audrey, Mildred, Ken, Carol, and many others, Simpasture is not a business, it's their people's post office. Or was, at least.