One of the more annoying hassles we discovered when we moved to our present house was that we had moved into a postcode delivered from the sorting office in Reading, rather than the more convenient offices in Wokingham or Crowthorne.

Although in general it’s not too much of a problem where our post comes from, if the postman is unable to deliver a package for some reason, it does mean that we have to go into the centre of Reading to pick it up. Unlike most of the parcel delivery companies the Royal Mail have their main site right in the centre of the town, adjacent to the railway station – due in part of course to needing to be close to the railway for Post Office Train.

If you look at the picture, the sorting office is the big building in the bottom of the shot, with the parcel collection office being in the top left corner. The car park containing all the red vans is where the Royal Mail park their vans, and the other car park is for the Vastern Road retail park, which includes a few large retail units and a TGI Friday’s Restaurant. Bear in mind that the largely empty situation in the rest of the car park is pretty normal – very rarely is that car park full. The only available parking, and indeed the parking everybody uses is in the retail park car park.

Anyway, today Beth went off into town to pick up a parcel, and drove into the car park. Being a Saturday morning, TGI Friday’s was closed, and the rest of the car park wasn’t busy, so she went to park in one of the spaces by the sorting office. When she got out, there were new signs warning that the car park was not for use of Royal Mail customers, and someone further up was arguing with some clampers, who had clamped their car in the few minutes it had taken for the person to go in and collect their parcel. Apparently since Wednesday they have been sitting in that part of the car park watching for people parking and going to the sorting office and then clamping them – cost being £120 to release the car. Whilst of course it is their car park, and they can limit access to whoever they like, with the amount of space their usually is in that car park it does seem to be a tremendous own goal by the owners of the retail park to annoy large parts of their potential customers by clamping them for collecting a parcel. Needless to say, the topic has kicked off discussion elsewhere, and even made the local paper. Locals are well advised to find somewhere else to park when they need to collect a parcel.