A Brighton Boy Blogs

The Royal Mail is the arbiter of all addresses. If it’s not on their database, it doesn’t exist. Thankfully my studio is on the database. So are quite a few other businesses in the local area. However it doesn’t stop the Royal Mail’s employees from deciding that they’re all based here, despite a very clear notice on the door saying exactly which businesses are based here, and even despite other notices that have been posted up at various times explicitly refuting the existence of other business names at this address.

So there I am, regularly left with large piles of other company’s post.

Should I just bin it? I think there’s a law against that, and besides I’d hate to think that another company might be getting loads of my mail & treating it as trash.

Should I play postman? I did for a while, but the novelty of my new unpaid position soon wore thin.

Should I complain? Yes, I’ve done that too. It took weeks for someone to contact me, and then weeks more for someone from Royal Mail to finally come and pick up the pile of by now unforgiveably late mail. And worst of all, the very next day there was yet another piece of misdelivered post.

Now I even have a red “sorry you were out” card on which the postman has written the name of a company never before heard of at (nor depicted on the door of) these premises. I tried calling the 0845 number on the card but their automated telephone system not only failed to acknowledge that these circumstances could ever possibly exist, it also failed to connect me to another human being so that I might report the error. So now whatever it was will sit at the sorting office for a few weeks until it’s returned to sender. It’s such a waste of everyone’s time, energies and resources, and ultimately all down to one man’s utter inability to read and compare simple names and phrases.

Still, perhaps it’s partly the council’s fault. They name and sign everything so confusingly. I’ve had my studio premises for five years now. Almost every day, someone comes in asking “Is this the trading estate?”. “No”, I reply, “this is the business centre, the trading estate is on the next road up”. In fact it’s probably true to say that if I had a tenner for every time it had happened, I wouldn’t need to actually do much work at all; £100 a time and I’d be in clover.

Clover? Hell, I’d even turn vigilante privateer postman.

Uncategorized frustration, Royal Mail

Yes, a new title for the blog… Same old rubbish to read though. Enjoy.

Uncategorized

Some events change your life in immense steps. Sometimes these events can be equally immense, and obviously life-changing; but others are disproportionately tiny compared to depth of their impact. The real impact, of course, is only felt by the person undergoing the changes.

The birth of each of my sons changed my life, both in quote different ways. Ben was not only my first son, he represents my first, faltering foray into fatherhood. Jake was the first baby I was really able to connect with. I have a special, but quite different relationship with each of them, in much the same way that they’re both similar to each other and quite different from each other. But if I have a Peter Pan style “happy thought”, it’s most definitely them. I can be having a bad day, but when I pick them up from school I can smile once again. Whatever did I do before they appeared?

Other parents will have empathy with my feelings about fatherhood, whereas readers with no children will most probably think “ahhhh that’s sweet” but will fail to have the sort of empathy that is only born of a shared experience.

Today I shared the excitement with my boys as I went through another life-changing experience. With any luck, this morning was the last morning ever when I wake up and have to grope around an indistinct, blurry world in search of my glasses; a ritual I’ve been practising since I was seven years old. Tomorrow morning I shall awake, open my eyes, and see clearly. No, it’s not as a result of surgery, nor some opthalmic miracle; it’s merely a new kind of contact lens. Other people have been wearing these for years, but they’ve never been available with my prescription until comparatively recently.

If you’ve worn glasses for as long as I have, or even longer, you’ll appreciate the immensity of this; if you have pretty good vision, you’ll be entirely unimpressed.

Miracles are a personal thing. Just make sure that in your busy life – when you hardly have time to grab some breakfast, much less stop and think – you manage to recognise and appreciate your personal miracles when they happen to you.

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