‘Return to sender, address unknown. No such number, no such zone’ – Return to Sender lyrics © Elvis Presley Music, Wise Brothers Music Llc, Abg Elvis Songs
They say happiness doesn’t just have one address, but when it comes to taking delivery of 200 books, you will find, as I did recently, that they are very, very wrong.
Last week, I had just arrived, somewhat bleary and several degrees colder, in the UK after an eleven hour flight back from Cape Town. So far, so good. I then travelled to Oxfordshire to have a few days with a friend who had been hosting my car on her drive and giving it a weekly outing. This was the day that delivery had been arranged for a reprint of my book, The Magnificent Moustache and other stories. I needed more for the slew of school visits I have next month, and for an exhibition in Derbyshire in ten days or so.
Since the logistics of my life tend towards the complicated (there is a reason this blog is called, Dancing Through Chaos), I had made all the necessary communications to have them delivered to my mother’s house. She doesn’t go much further than Waitrose these days, and she announced that she would forgo that daily treat in order to stay in and receive the delivery. Bless her.
A well known courier service contacted me on that day to advise me that several boxes would appear in the hour slot between 11.30am and 12.30pm. What a helpful communiqué, I thought to myself. Knowing the matriarch had already told me she would be at home, I didn’t feel the need to pass that message on.
Probably just as well, since it was sometime later that afternoon when I found a message from a lady I didn’t know, nestling in the messenger box of my Facebook-writer page. This baffled lady told me she thought that perhaps the large stack of books currently occupying more than half of her porch might be mine. She had no idea why they were there, or where they had come from. Using impressive initiative, she had slit open the top one and investigated the contents. Confused as she was, she resorted to the great detective method that is Facebook and proceeded to look for me. Result!
I had thought it strange that my mother hadn’t let me know they had arrived safely, and now I knew why. Simple; they had not.
However, kudos to the delivery chap(s); they were not only in the right town (phew!), but also in the right road (double phew!). Somewhere along the line, the number 30 had become a number 50. No, she assured me, the ink had not been smudged or smeared; it was as clear as anything. But it was also wrong.
I trawled back through my messages to ascertain wether or not I had suffered a moment of fuzzy-brain syndrome combined with keyboard malfunction, and given the wrong information. I had not.
I have my suspicions as to where the ball was dropped in this unfolding drama, but I doubted that I would get much response.
So it was, that observant, curtain-twitching neighbours would have noticed my mum’s friend (who had fortuitously come round for a coffee date) driving down the road to collect said boxes, returning, and between them making good use of a wheel barrow to transport multiple boxes into the house. I had had visions of my nonagenarian mother trying to lift the books, which would not have been a good idea.
So, thank goodness for good friends; thank goodness (on this occasion at least), for Facebook, and thank goodness that it all worked out in the end.
I now have enough books for the upcoming school visits (strikes permitting), and I made a new friend. When I arrived at my mother’s in Surrey from Oxford this week, I took a peace offering and a thank you gift to the lady at number 50. Although she was still at work, I met her very obliging and helpful husband, and felt pleased to have connected with another family in the road where I was born. Most of our original neighbours are long gone, so finding new and friendly faces is a bonus.
Happiness, in this case, did have more than one address, but I’m very relieved that the books didn’t end up at the other end of the country. When my book, Spiritual Feasting was published in 2020, the entire delivery went missing for two days; no-one knew where they were. Fortunately, that story also had a happy ending.
Images credits:
Purple door: Curology on Unsplash; Delivery: Kazeem Hussein on Unsplash; Books: author’s own
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