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Mail your packages early, joked the American comedian Johnny Carson, so the postal service has plenty of time to lose them.
Royal Mail posties in Northern Ireland have, it seems, proven such criticism may be unfair.
Staff have been praised after delivering a letter that came without an address or surname but rather included a description of the intended recipient: “lives across the road from the Spa his ma + da used to own”.
The County Antrim posties put in a detective shift that even Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of to identify that the sender – who had included half a postcode – was trying to reach musician Feargal Lynn.
“His mother was Mary and da Joseph,” the description continued. “Moved to Waterfoot after he got married, plays guitar and used to run discos in the parochial hall and the hotel in the 80s,.”
It concluded with its finest line: “Friends with the fella who runs the butchers in Waterfoot too.”
Describing his astonishment at receiving the mail, Lynn wrote on Twitter: “Harty applause to @RoyalMail Cushendall and Ballymena for being able to deliver this letter to me today. Got a much needed laugh! They had first name, the village where I grew up and half the postcode.. the rest is more like my life story!”
It is not the first time the Royal Mail has come up trumps by delivering letters without conventional addresses.
Last year, Catrina Davies, who lives in a shed in Cornwall, was handed a letter in an envelope omitting a town, street name or postcode; and spelling her surname wrong but which did note she reside “near a village 21 miles from Land’s End”.
In 2010, meanwhile, a postie rose to the challenge when they were asked to find a couple with an address given as “somewhere near the golf course in Thetford, Norfolk”.
