TALK about an unwanted Christmas present. Just as the Witney Gazette was going to press the story came out that the Post Office was definitely going ahead with its plan to close the town’s main branch.

It was confirmation of what many locals had suspected would happen — the loud and clearly articulated views of the people of Witney would be ignored.

Few people in the town back the idea of moving the post office to WH Smith. They regard it as a daft idea because the shop in the Woolgate is simply too cramped.

The current post office was too small and queues would regularly stretch out of the door. So what is the sense in effectively moving it to a smaller building?

Indeed, only last weekend we were in the post office attempting to send a parcel, but we had to abandon queueing after 10 minutes when it become apparent that we would be waiting for much, much longer.

We then called in to WH Smith to buy a couple of magazines for our children, who had understandably become bad-tempered during the aborted post office mission.

We counted ourselves lucky to bang into only three elbows in the narrow aisles and briefly lose only one child.

Our experience is that the post office needs to be in a building as big as WH Smth in its own right, not shoehorned in next to the magazines, the pencil cases and the cut-price autobiographies of footballers and chefs.

We hope we have made our view very clear — the decision is wrong-headed.