THOMAS ARNALL, postmaster of Oxford, laid the foundation stone at St Aldate’s Post Office on a wet Wednesday morning in June, 1879.

“May it do honour to the man who designed it,” he said, dripping with Victorian pomp.

The Oxford post office at the time employed 121 staff, handling nearly a quarter of a million letters per week. 23 postmen delivered 90,000 letters a day around the city itself, with four deliveries and six collections. 87 of Arnall’s staff were to be based in the new building, boasting indoor loos and a state of the art ventilation shaft for the emission of foul air.

Flattening the mortar with a trowel, Arnall gave the tonne and a half slab of Tilbury stone three taps for luck, and submerged a gold coin with an image of Queen Victoria into the slop.

The slab can still be seen on the building today. Of course, Queen Victoria’s face has been squashed under a wall for the past 136 years, but her imperial cipher “VR” still flanks the Royal Coat of Arms above the door.

Until a couple of years ago EG Rivers, the man who designed the building, might still have recognised the basic features of the “public hall” beyond his mull granite columns, where customers queued to buy stamps and post parcels at the counters.

But staggering changes have swept into this particular post office within the past 24 months. It’s uncanny but the changes happen to coincide with the privatisation of Royal Mail, completed last week when the Government sold off its remaining 13 per cent stake. What would Rivers make of it all now, I wonder?

In today’s thoroughly modern post office a gumptious employee hurries about the room, hounded by bemused members of the public.

Largely because she has been made to wear a uniform with “Hello! I’m Here To Help” printed on the back in giant type.

Another employee has scrawled “please take my life” in green marker pen on a flipchart to by the door. Next to these words, an arrow points to a self-service machine. It turns out that “my life” is a type of ticket.

So is “my identity.” Choosing one of these tickets from the machine will match your enquiry to the skill sets of one of two workers who remain, propped up behind the counter as though suspended in formaldehyde. Both toil stoically through the queues of hapless customers.

All this change in two brief years! If you never go into the post office you wouldn’t even notice it happening. If you do you would be forgiven for thinking that someone high up has stolen the blueprint from a successful fast food joint, and tried to slap it on to this once venerable institution like ketchup.

Alongside “my life” and “my identity” how about including a ticket labelled “my burger“? It would at least give me something else to think about while languishing in the queue.