Yesterday I got a travel brochure through the door addressed to a previous occupant. So I stuck a ‘return to sender’ label on it, and left it by the front door to repost the next time I went out. Today I left the house to go to work; I picked up the brochure on the way, and walked four houses down the street to the incredibly convenient nearby postbox.

Or rather, to where the postbox used to be. It's vanished, with not even an obvious scar where it was uprooted. I stood and stared at the empty space for a couple of minutes, unable to believe I hadn't just made a silly mistake of some sort.

Bah! Suddenly the niceness of the location of my house has gone down. Not that the convenient postbox contributed at all to my purchase decision – I didn't even notice it was there until after completion – but I've been finding it thoroughly useful while it was there, and now they've taken it away. Humph.

(So now I need to find my next nearest postbox. A quick google turns up four or five websites which purport to be able to show me a map of where all the nearest postboxes are to a given location; but they're all rubbish as far as I can tell, and in particular they all have incomplete data.)