Two acts of civic mindedness by the fine citizens of Archway made my morning this morning when I went to the post office to get my E111 stamped for our trip to Ireland.

After some circling I finally found a parking spot on Junction Road and when I got to the pay-and-display machine I saw something very odd: someone had a stuck a chit in a slot in the machine. I looked at the chit. It looked like the kind of thing that might have come out of the machine itself. It had today’s date. It had Junction Road written on it. It said 11:02 - half an hour from now. I looked around suspiciously, and the street was crawling with traffic wardens (that’s what traffic wardens do, says Martin, they crawl). Was this a trick? I turned it over. It didn’t say “non-transferrable” (I know these traffic wardens are sticklers for detail). Thank you, mysterious driver, for your act of civic mindedness. I stuck the chit in my car and went to the post office with a spring in my step.

Now post offices are depressing places. There’s a branch of mathematics called queueing theory - for years it was used to work out how many cash desks you needed at any time of the day, based on how long people were prepared to wait, the speed of processing a customer, how people were likely to move between queues, and so on. Then they discovered it would all be a whole lot better if there was just a single queue and the person at the front always went to the next available desk. These days the post office uses queueing theory to work out how many desks they need to keep open to make their queues just on the edge of “really efficient”, and they subtract one. Post office queues are very, very depressing.

So I’m standing in the queue, which is moving very, very slowly, and I begin to realise that cashier-number-11-please seems to be working at about five times the rate of everyone else. Cashier-number-5-please is way down the other end, and he and his customer seem to be discussing the finer points of double-entry bookkeeping. Cashier-number-9-please is struggling with a customer who seems to want to post a postcard. Cashier-number-10-please suddenly appears, but her little light doesn’t go on, and it turns out she’s been given the task of sitting at the desk and shuffling pennies around in a particularly annoying manner. Cashier-number-11-please is going great guns. He even gets a customer with a particularly bulky parcel (never a good sign) and deals with them 45 seconds flat. Go cashier-number-11-please!

It’s with some delight - though of course inevitable - that when my turn comes it’s cashier-number-11-please who’s ready to serve me. I give him my E111.

“Do you have the other form?” he asks. Uh-oh.

“No,” I say, “I downloaded it from the web. This is all there was”.

“There should have been an Application for E111, too.” He’s right. There was one of those on the web page, but I ignored it, because I couldn’t think why I’d want an application for a form if I could also download the form itself. Obviously it’s not my place to wonder why.

“Never mind, I’ll get you one,” he says, and he does. “Just fill it in over there.”

“Will I have to queue up again?” I ask. Please say no. Please be nice to me.

“No, just come straight back”. Wow. He could have told me to queue again. But he didn’t. A small thing for him, but a big thing for me. Act of civic mindedness number two. I go and fill out the form. I come back. In that time he’s served two more customers. The woman trying to send a postcard with cashier-number-9-please is calling her husband over for the second part of a postcode.

Cashier-number-11-please takes my form. Stamp, stamp, squiggle, tear.

“Do you have travel insurance?” he says.

“Yes.”

“You can get your euros here if you want.” Thank you, cashier-number-11-please. I happen to have my euros, too, but if I didn’t I would certainly get them from you.

He gives me my E111 back. I skip out. The angels of traffic death have passed over my car. There’s still 10 minutes left on the chit, so I put it back in the pay-and-display machine in the slim hope that it’s of use to someone else. Get in the car. Blondie on the stereo. Zoom into the sunset. Fade out.