At about 03:00 on Thursday morning the last deliverable message from the old queue was dispatched - hoorah - leaving 941 deferred messages (mostly mailbounces to nonexistent spammers, no doubt) and service returned almost to normal later that day. On Friday afternoon we got word that the power cables had been repaired, so that's pretty much the end of that.
Meanwhile, amid talks of a national postal strike ballot (which voted against) and an additional ballot in London (which voted for), apparently Oxfordshire's postal workers walked out a week last Friday, unreported by the national media.
The first I knew of the end of the strike was the arrival of a letter from Citroën UK. We have been unable to use our car radio since the day we got it, because the dealer didn't know the security code (d'oh!) and the nearest official Citroën dealer is 20 miles or so from here. So a few weeks ago I wrote to Citroën UK on the offchance they would be willing to look it up in their database and send it to us (given that our address is on the official vehicle registration document). Well, they did.
So on Saturday we put the code into the radio and. . . no dice. We tried twice to make sure - and now this wonderful security system means that each time we turn the radio on we will now have to wait for 22 minutes before even being able to attempt to enter the code. We are not impressed - especially since I don't doubt that any car-thief worth his salt would have had the thing decoded in ten minutes. The only people it inconveniences are the legitimate users. :-(