TO HAVE

Those of you who come here regularly will have noticed a slight tendency to make mountains out of molehills, or perhaps for me to make high dramas out of the most mundane of crises, however, there is a strong literary tradition for over-elaboration of the tiniest events, and I’ve never been one to buck with tradition.

So, with a certain amount of inevitability, it’s time to conclude one of the smaller sagas that have been gnawing away at these humble pages for the last couple of weeks, namely the long-lost  Humphrey Bogart films and how the stupidly complicated story of their disappearance finally resolved itself.

I bet you can hardly wait.

And so it came to pass that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall did indeed pass through the letterbox of MAWH Towers upon a recent Friday lunchtime.

And, as is the way with these things, they must have enjoyed it so much that they did so again whilst I was out on Saturday, so now the inevitable two copies are sitting around the house mocking me, and with the sorry irony that only a disappointment with the much anticipated can muster, I haven’t had a spare minute this weekend to give them even the most cursory of glances.

One will have to go back, of course.

Which leads us into the merry dance of the “returns policy”.

Sigh!

To quote the rather good email – and it was, really, very good and much appreciated especially as he did take the time to re-send the order at a time when it was utterly lost in limbo - from “Customer Services Daniel”:-

“WHAT IF I GET TWO PACKAGES? – If the original package should arrive before the replacement is dispatched…” (actually, due to the strange wibbly wobbly time effects of the postal service the replacement arrived before the original) “…please cancel your replacement order, etc…”

“If the original package should arrive afterwards, please refuse delivery of the parcel so it is returned to us by the carrier.”

Now our postie is an affable enough young chap and I wasn’t sure how he would take too the rejection, but I stirred myself in readiness.

Unfortunately I was out, and when I got home, said parcel was upon the doormat, smiling that cheeky “gotcha” smile up at me.

So then we get to “If you were unable to refuse delivery of the item…” (and really, how could I? If I'd been in, such a rejection might have stung the poor lad or done him considerable emotional harm…) “...we ask that you return it to us” and the usual means of doing this come into play.

Now I don’t mind this. I’ve done it before. Sometimes it’s a bind because I then find all the printer cartridges have run out when I try to print off the returns voucher, so I end up having to order more of them, but that’s probably my fault for not keeping the stocks up enough.

What did annoy me, though, was the fact that this time, the printed returns voucher said those doom laden words “You will have to pay postage” so, instead of just popping it into a postbox over the weekend, I’m now stuck with the chore of finding some time in my busy schedule to trudge over to one of the far distant and few remaining Post Offices around these parts and fork out any savings I may have made on my initial bargain to send the blooming thing back to them.

Still, hopefully that will bring this sad little story to a close, and I shall never speak of it again. Probably. Ultimately it’s not really their fault that their dispatches can get lost in some mysterious void for a fortnight or more, but the almighty amount of irritation and bother involved has been a wearisome and tiring experience.

For all of us.

Ah well, on statistically the most miserable day of the year, I was bound to have a bit of a moan. I guess with me it was kind of inevitable.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll tell you a happy story involving a frog…