Return To Sender

There's an easy trap to fall into when you're blogging of using your posts to have a rant.

It's something I've tried hard to avoid but I suppose it doesn't hurt to let off steam every now and then.

And the source of my displeasure today is our recently flogged off (far too cheaply) Royal Mail.

I've been very busy in the last few weeks casting yet another batch of SAR/WHR wagon kits to restock the Ffestiniog Railway shop - they've been selling them as fast as I can make them this summer.

I've got a job lot almost ready to dispatch and all I'm waiting on is a resupply of the brass bogie frets.

And this is where the postie comes in. Or more to the point, hasn't!

Despite being posted a week ago these frets have yet to turn up here and a little investigation (nothing gets past a trained reporter) reveals they have been ricocheting up and down the United Kingdom for the past seven days.

The package got to within a couple of hundred yards of my letterbox but it transpired there was one number missing on the address - an easy mistake to make - but as it was a signed for package my neighbour down the road denied all knowledge and refused to take it in.

The postie apparently scratched his head - because they don't wear caps anymore, standards have slipped! - and took it back to the sorting office where they decided to return it whence it came to the south coast of England.

(These bogie parts were, I believe, originally etched in deepest Argyll so they have recorded quite a considerable mileage by now..)

What annoys me is that apparently no one made much of an effort to attempt to redeliver them to the correct address and instead took the easy way out and returned them to sender.

It's not as if I'm unknown. They've been delivering mail to me at this address for 5 years! The postcode was correct, the street address was correct. Surely someone must have twigged?

For all I know the same postie most likely had other (junk) mail for my household which he pushed through my letter box just a few seconds later. But it appears not to have registered.

Thinking about it some more I am astonished that an organisation such as the Royal Mail - which came up with the postcode system for goodness sake! - doesn't have a database where they can tap in a name and a postcode and match them up with a house number.

I bet any number of double glazing firms or ambulance-chasing let-us-sue-for-u merchants have that data at their fingertips. But not, it appears, the postie.

I am, as you might have gathered, ever so slightly peeved.