Lancaster

A friend of mine has been looking for a knitter to make some things for her Etsy shop, so I have offered to have a go. She wanted to send me some wool, so last week I rang round just about every post office on the Lancaster Canal to find one that offered the Post Restante service. None of them in Lancaster or the main office in Preston did this service. Post Restante means that you can have post (as long as it is sent by Royal Mail or Parcel Force) sent to a Post Office addressed to you there for collection. We’ve used it a couple of times before and it is very handy.

After beating my head against the cabin sides when I couldn’t find a Post Office to send the wool to I then gave the marina in Garstang a call and cheekily asked them if they would accept a parcel for me. The chap there uummed for a bit and then said that I could. Brilliant! I did however pursue the Post Restante service and rang Royal Mail, the chap there was flummoxed too, as most branches now offer Local Collect for internet purchases which is very similar. He suggested contacting the Post Office via their website. This has proved interesting.

Originally I thought that the service was offered at the branches discretion, this is not so as is explained in the following response to my email “This service is available at all Post Office branches, the service is offered at the discretion of Royal Mail and Post Office Ltd not the individual branches. Any office that refuses to offer this service should be advised to contact their helpline. I believe the trouble you have experienced, possibly stems from the offices not knowing what the Poste Restante service is. If you can provide the names of these branches we can contact them and explain about the service. Hopefully this would resolve the problems you have experienced.”

If you are wanting anything sending to you around the Lancaster area all of the Post Offices should now know about the service.

So today we jumped on a bus to go and collect my parcel from the marina. The bus driver suggested that we bought a family dayrider rather than a rider each. This would save us 40p and if we bought a couple of children whilst we were out they would travel for free. Looks like family tickets are the way forward for lots of things. After about half an hour, most of which was spent driving around the University we arrived in Garstang and walked our way to the canal and marina. Here was my parcel waiting for me at the chandlers, some rather lovely muted brown wool.

Back to the bus stop and on to Preston. My mobile phone has been mended and was sent back last week to the shop. It turned out that as my phone screen was slightly cracked this meant that the repair couldn’t be done under warranty. I still had another year on contract so my hands were tied into paying for it to be mended. Grrr! At least I now have a phone that works (I hope) and it isn’t huge like the one I had on loan from EE.

Next I wanted to visit the Abakhan shop. Bridget had mentioned the Chester store to me a while ago, so I wanted to look round. Wow! How much fabric?! The shop has the usual buy fabric by the meter, which is all around the outside of the shop. But then on racks there are off cuts of fabric, averaging about 2m in length. They are collected together in type of fabric and colours, just about every fabric is there. These off cuts you buy by weight, not length. Plain cotton £9.95 a kilo etc. Not good if you need fabric for long curtains, but fine for most other things as you can get more than one piece if you can match the colours. Upstairs was a wool and haberdashery heaven. I had a good look round, refrained from buying any wool but did pick up enough fabric to make a couple of chunky bags and some red that I’ve been wanting for a rug on Oleanna. Looks like I’m going to be busy with needles and hooks.

0 locks, 0 miles, 3 buses, 4 bridges, 1 open parcel, 250gram wool, 2 jacket potatoes, 2 teas, 1 mended phone, 1 Aladdin’s fabric cave, 2.5kg of fabric, 1 tension square needing to be knitted.