Outgoing Cressroads’ Postmistress Jackie Sanger looked to salvage a further £1,000 from selling the remaining year on the lease for her passport-photo kiosk as her 'Everything Must Go' sale prepared the way to gut the leased building on Alresford’s West Street for its upcoming change of use to an undertaker’s front shop window, office and chapel of rest.

When there were no takers for her kiosk, agreement was reached for it to move to immediately outside the door to the town council offices at Alresford Recreation Centre, and from where her proven little earner continues to provide photographs approved to accompany applications for driving licences, fishing permits and passports next obtained from the newly-established Post Office counter at the Co-op supermarket in town.

And the lessee?

After 30 years of Post Office service, Jackie has changed wickets to begin shouting the odds from behind a Winchester bookmaker’s counter.

“It’s a racing certainty,” complain the town’s posties. “We’re next to move. Our sorting office is at the back of what’s changing to an undertaker’s – everyone believes the Co-op Funeral Service – and we are to be shut down to become part of Winnall’s Royal Mail operation.

“From where – you mind my words, within the year – we’ll find ourselves delivering to Alresford from up in that neck of the old Winchester woods.”

Meanwhile, the go-getting Co-op supermarket Cressroads prefers to adopt as its more chic-sounding Coop, looks to feather its refurbished West Street nest at the expense of pesky Tesky’s Extra-of-a-store on nearby fashionable Georgian Broad Street.

While the Coop is switched to deploying modernized cash registers, it continues to resists any commercial temptation to install the like of its competitor’s robotic American checkouts costing as much as £175,000 for three.

“But forever and opening all hours, they do play up,” complain convenience staff.

“While continuing to serve customers the good, old-fashioned way, we are stopped in our tracks again and again to solve one problem after another encountered by those of our customers wanting to avoid queuing and trying to check out their groceries at one or other of the automated machines.” - www.blogsbody.co.uk