God bless the Royal Mail! It's on days like today that I regret not giving my postman a Christmas tip, because the service he and his workmates provide is second to none.
I had two letters today, both from the PO Box I set up so that lunatics could send me mail without knowing where I lived.
I opened one up and it was from someone who had been to see my show, "Someone Likes Yoghurt" in Edinburgh. I thought this was a little odd, as that happened some time ago and then I checked the date on the letter to see that it had been sent in August 2005. The other package came from America, which is admittedly a long way and contained a review of the American version of Talking Cock, again something that came out some time ago and a check of the postmark revealed that the paper had been sent to me in June 2005, some 18 months ago. Perhaps it had been pulled across the ocean on a string.
I mention this, not to deride the hardworking people at Royal Mail. After all I only pay a hundred or so pounds a year for this service (and maybe get about ten to twenty letters a year), so it's unreasonable to expect it to be efficient. But just to say that I do reply to most letters (unless received from people who are unreasonably rude, who have threatened to kill me or who actually enclose letter bombs) so if you have written to me and not received a reply then it's probably because your letter is sitting in a sorting room somewhere waiting for a fat lazy postal worker to choose between sorting it into the right pigeon-hole or gunning down all his fellow employees. You can understand with a choice like that why delivery of mail would take such an unfeasibly long time.
Of course this whole thing gives me hope that there are bags and bags of mail waiting for me somewhere, which is always a nice thought giving one a false sense of popularity. But the truth of the matter is that I still get less post than the previous occupants of this house, the shady proprietors of
Shit Films. They often get three or four letters a day, still, four years after moving out. I had gone through months of posting these letters back saying "Return to Sender - no longer at this address", but it didn't really seem to slow the flow down, so now I usually just throw the letters away. Occasionally I will open one, just to see whether it contains evidence of some illegal deal or clue to why someone would want to break my legs for being associated with the company. The other day there was a cheque from some share option for over £400. How strange that these people have not given their forwarding address to people who want to give them money.
It is dispiriting to find yourself getting less mail than people who don't live in your house, especially so long after their departure, but I don't let it get to me too much. And maybe if I can set up some kind of false bank account in the name of the previous occupants (I have enough of their mail to prove my address to any suspicious clerk) then I can make enough money to pay for the inefficient PO Box system I have had set up. As well as pay the medical bills for any broken limbs I might receive for having been foolish enough to buy a house off of some possible crooks.
That would be illegal of course and I would never break the law.
Maybe if I tipped my postman next Christmas things might improve though.
