Rodney Sanches
The Adventure Continues
Leaving the flat, with items to post, a plush dog with pink ears, tiny fabric shoes and jacket in green. I looked in at the post office on our street. It was crammed with people. People on each other shoulders, attached to the ceiling and walls, so many people. I did not enter and caught a bus instead taking me to Camberwell. There is a post office there also, from outside it resembled a bomb damaged ruin, this motif continues inside, in which the victims waiting for service were few. I gave up, as a woman who was served before, but returned, asked the woman behind the glass an enigma, may I have the receipt for a transaction, past. I imagine they are still attempting to discover the conclusion for this quest.
At noon I met Joel at a restaurant named Falafel and we chatted and ate. The food was strange in its excellent taste and value. Then I took a bus to Oxford Circus, on a mission to see some Peter Doig paintings. I went in entirely the wrong direction and found my self in a park. On the way to the paintings, I spotted a number of post offices, full and busy. There was a coffee stand on the stairs of a church which served very good coffee, the two people before me indicated that the server was not present yesterday and his replacement was incompetent, my boss, mentioned the server.
More wandering took me past the gallery and then finally at. Brass button for entry, heavy door, then a light one and up some grey carpet, soft stairs, following the direction of a polite woman behind a desk. Paintings now, big and small, flags and people, no faces, implications of action and a younger woman, behind a smaller desk. Someone was drilling pavement nearby.
I walked past the famous USA Embassy, with their inexplicable state flags and abundance of bollards, I remembered that the Canadian High Commission was to be nearby, humble and serene as described by a fellow country person, some time ago. I found it, and was asked why I was interested in entering by a highly visible fellow in his working class neon vest. I said I want to vote. He directed me to another door. This door was covered in notes and one of the notes asked for the door to be knocked, there was hardly anywhere to knock, with all of the notes, I rapped on a tiny patch of free door. Repeating my question to a new fellow, who sounded a bit Canadian he asked me to wait while he gathers some brochures. The rooms had a giant heavy doors, a metal detector and X-ray scanner and a meter high cylinder that was filled with metal shavings, with something about blasts written on it. It was conspicuous in its lack of charm and coffee. He returned not with brochures but with the message that a new fella would soon emerge from the giant grey metal doors. Soon he did, with fragment of paper, with answers jotted to the bottom and helpful highlighting.
Finally a quiet post office was discovered and I purchased a box for too much money, refused the offer for discounted packing tape, due to the surplus at home, then free packing tape and the use of company scissors was offered. The handle was broken and taped ineffectually with packing tape. I was able to acquire cool stamps, with pictures of Venus, the planet, not the god, on them.