Pen & Key ~ Writing, Life and Me: A Pen and Key Exclusive

First off, I'm sorry I haven't blogged about anything in the last week or so; school started again, I got an A in Spanish, I was in a real 'why must I do this' over English. The real reason, though, is because I couldn't think of anything else to blog about other than this, which I've been planning to write for literally months now, and I am now able to do so.
This is something that most people in my actual life know about me, but as I remember, I have never mentioned it online, to anybody. A real Pen and Key Exclusive then.

For the last 14 years, I have lived in a Post Office.

Now, before we get somebody being sarky and asking if I sleep on the shop floor (there have literally been people who asked that), no I don't. For a little bit of information, my house is technically two houses, with a quarter of the ground floor of these two houses as the Post Office. My bedroom is directly above it.

The reason I am just now talking about this, is that, as of yesterday, my house is no longer part Post Office. After fourteen years, my mum has handed the shop over to the newsagents down the road, due to a change in contracts that she didn't want to take part in.

Technically speaking, three generations of my family knows how to work a Post Office. When my mum was younger, she had the same experience as me of living in a Post Office when her parents owned one; mum's worked in and lived around Post Offices for over 30 years. My sisters and I all know how to work in a Post Office; the other two can run a counter, whereas I've so far only done parcels and safe-counting. Maybe someday I can work in a Post Office and learn everything else, I don't know.

Over the last couple of years since I started learning how to do parcels and things, it's become pretty commonplace to walk in from school, ditch my bag, get a biscuit (I'm a disaster when trying to walk past a biscuit tin), then just start doing parcels, or count up the safe. I got called in four or five times over the Easter holidays, and that's nothing compared to Christmas. I'm honestly quite happy to help out my mum, especially knowing it gets her out of the shop earlier. A large part of my childhood I feel was shaped because I didn't see my mum until after half 5 at least, for instance my starting to cook for myself at age 11.

Me and mum had a giggle at this. We had two banners that we decided to write on and stick up. The full message is Thank you and goodbye, Love (my mum's name), but this is all that we could fit on the first banner. Me and mum kept laughing, and saying that we should stick it outside now that the shop is shut. The boy in the pictures is my little nephew, he's four now.

However, I'm not going to spend ages talking about this and that, it's a long topic (14 years long, technically), so I'm going to create a series of blog posts entitled Post Office Living, where I will talk about the different aspects of my life that living in a Post Office has affected.

So now, if I ever play two truths, one lie with you, you know that this is the truth

Now have some photos I took to commemorate the closing of my beautiful shop