Empty

I get a letter from Ko, our local Kids Events in the Parks manager. She is quite careful about how she phrases it, but basically she says in her letter that if I want to have passes for the childrens events in the parks over summer, then I have to pay for them.

I ring up. 'I posted the cheque to you', I declare, 'and I posted it at the beginning of the week'. I didn't say that actually I had the envelope stamped and addressed over two weeks ago and then carried it around in my bag all last week while we were wandering about Kent, but it never seemed to make the post box, despite the fact that there was a box just outside the barrier to our Stalag caravan site. So I brought the envelope all the way home again and posted it in the letter box outside our house, which I probably could have done two weeks ago, if I hadn't been in a hurry.

'There was nothing in the envelope', says Ko. 'Nothing in it?' I ask. 'It was empty' she adds. How is this possible? Perhaps she took out the note and the cheque, and lost them. I am not so haphazard in my daily life that I forgot to put them inside in the first place. Surely that's not possible.

Of course I do have form here. Last year we went to a dragonfly hunt in the park where we saw not a single dragonfly but we did see about four inches of rainwater tip on our heads and the river rise at such an alarming rate that one of the parks people brought his landrover down into the field to rescue us. I was the only one without transport. For some reason which I cannot now remember Dig took the car off us, drove it home and fell asleep. Anyway, when we were ejected from the landrover I left behind my glasses, papers and sundry assorted items which I then spent about two weeks looking for before realising I'd left them in some bloke's landrover's glove compartment and had to go to the parks office to pick them up.

So on receiving no cheque, no note and in fact, nothing, if they are surmising 'It's that triplet woman with the hair', then it probably would not surprise me. I had been on the phone three times to them about the passes before I even got round to the posting bit. And from then on it's all straightforward: I stick a little return name and address on the back of all my outgoing mail because I do not trust the Post Office. They might be unreliable and lose my envelope.