the bad old ways

I was twice-disappointed today, but only in the sense that what I was expecting to occur did not occur rather than things I were hoping to happen not happening. First of all, I was expecting to be mildly enraged by the Royal Mail when attempting to retrieve a parcel they claimed to have attempted to deliver on Sunday the 13th but for which they had not left a delivery-attempt card. As the item was only Recorded rather than Special delivery it had already had its week and so would have been very likely to have been set to return to its sender, though the online tracking status did not yet say this. Crowdsourcing had supplied the direct landline number for the inconvenient Portobello sorting office on which I spoke to the most helpful Royal Mail employee I have yet encountered. The helpful man confirmed that the package was still described as being present on the tracking software but claimed to be unable to find it on any of the appropriate shelves, though he might easily have just put the phone down and rattled some bits of paper on his desk when he said he was searching for it. Though mildly irritated at the absence of the contents of the package I'd not been too hopeful of receiving it but at least managed to not receive it in a vaguely helpful manner, whereas if I'd popped past and into the sorting office on the way out of the city I'd have probably ended up extremely irritated.

Despite the threats of terrible driving conditions the driving conditions were mostly quite tolerable, with the occasional bit of snow remaining on the overtaking lane of the dual-carriageway bits and plenty of snow on the fields to each side but generally mostly grippy road and (until we reached Lincolnshire) people driving fairly sensibly. Almost as soon as we'd entered Lincolnshire people started rashly overtaking on blind bends and generally driving as you'd expect people to drive in the road traffic fatality capital of Britain for several years running earlier in the century. There are occasional signs up stating the number of monthly deaths; for November they were one up on the previous year, though such warnings didn't stop us being overtaken even more (and even more incautiously) on the smaller and snowier road the other side of Lincoln. We passed one car being dragged by another and one sitting in a ditch with a crumpled front, though it must have been there at least overnight as it was already covered with snow. Fortunately we'd managed to get off in time to arrive just before it became entirely dark, conscious of the saying about most accidents happening within a few miles of the destination and the completely ungritted nature of the roads off the main road in my parents' village.