Postal strike

"My old boss lives round here somewhere...I wonder which is his house?" The street, part of a little knot of recently-built roads which collectively formed a dead-end, was new to me, and to Lunchista fille who had asked to come with me to pick up a package of leaflets from somebody's porch. We kept going round bends that led the wrong way, in roads which all seemed to have been named after Vikings. Well, whatever floats your boat I suppose. There was no-one to ask the way: it was a Tuesday morning and it was easy to see that the place, with its immaculate, open-plan gardens, was completely deserted.

"Listen..."

"What??"

"...nothing. Isn't it quiet?"

And it really was. The older, straight road that led to the one way into the little knot of roads, is itself a dead-end, and as if that wasn't enough we were low enough down to be shielded from the otherwise-ubiquitous noise from our city's ring road. In other words, nobody would break the silence by coming in here unless they were utterly lost, or had some connection to the families in the neat modern houses.

Eventually, right at the far end of the little knot, we located our leaflets under a porch. We noticed wind-chimes hanging there, but even they were silent. I picked up the bundle and we headed back.

It's funny what you notice when things are so quiet: not just sounds, but unusual sights too. Perhaps, like in the American joke about driving down a street looking for the right house-number and turning down the car radio so as not to miss it, we all have a bit of synaesthesia lurking in our brains.

"Hey look at that post-box" There was a banana-skin directly underneath it, but also a note that someone had stuck on near the slot. We went over to see what it said. Someone had posted a letter but forgotten to put a stamp on it: they must have gone back home, fetched a stamp, some cellophane, tape and a pencil and paper, and written the note that we could see, asking whoever collected the letters that day to stick on the missing stamp. As we stepped out into the straight road, we noticed the post-van coming down. We decided to wait and see what the reaction would be, so we carried on walking until he had driven round the corner and had time to stop at the post-box and get out. Then we turned round to kneb.

And he'd gone.

No van, no postie. He must have driven right past all of it. Then I thought, perhaps it's easier for him to turn the van at the end of the knot and then pick up the letters on his way out. So we picked a convenient low front garden wall next to a tree, just within line-of-sight, and we waited. And waited. And, have you ever noticed that, if you have no business waiting somewhere (a bus-stop would have come in handy, or even a dog), it just seems like ages? It's easier with two people than just one because you can always chatter as if you've just bumped into each other or have suddenly developed something urgent and complicated to say (in our case it could have been, for example, the crucial but convoluted logistics of practically any arrangement involving school). We were there for 15 minutes (we timed it).

We could have walked to the end of the knot and back in that time, probably twice, so where was our postie? We gave up and turned to go: we'd just have to put up with never knowing whether the mystery letter would have been delivered.

Then in the few minutes it took us to walk back up the straight road away from the little knot, several other vans drove past us and went in. A florist's. An electrician. Generic tradesman's white vans (several). A red van (not a postie). A fishmonger for heaven's sake: I hadn't seen one of those since I was Lunchista fille's age. All within the space of about five minutes. None re-emerged.

We wondered if someone had maliciously called them all to the same address. Had they all got it in for our postie? Was someone in the knot running a Red Diesel racket? Or had the entire far end of the knot, just after we'd left it with its silent wind-chimes, been devoured by a Black Hole?