Royal Mail delivers letter with no address — just recipient’s life story on the envelope

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Rain, snow, sleet and hail may be the U.S. postal service’s obstacles to overcome, but the U.K.’s Royal Mail system has shown it too can accomplish the near-impossible, by occasionally delivering a letter without having so much as an address.

In Northern Ireland last week, Feargal Lynn received a letter that had just his first name, his town and part of the postal code — but it seems the letter got to him because the sender detailed much of Lynn’s life story on the envelope.

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It reads:

“Feargal,
Lives across the road from the Spar (grocery store) his ma + da used to own it, his mother was Mary and da, Joseph, moved to Waterfoot after he got married, plays guitar + used to run discos in the parochial hall and the hotel in the ’80s. Friends with the fella runs the butchers in Waterfoot too
Cushendall
BT44
N. Ireland”

Feargal Lynn “got a much-needed laugh” from his mail delivery that day.

And of course commenters got in on the action, too.

The Streatham Football Club in London commented that “w e got something like that last month. Obviously takes incredible effort to get things like this delivered, well done to the posties” :

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And this comment came from a Northern Ireland grandmother who had this sweet letter delivered to her from Scotland, also without an address (below Feargal’s post):

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It harks back to 2016, when a family travelling in Iceland had visited a small farm and wanted to send the hosts a note. Without an address, they did what they could and drew a road map on the envelope , complete with the local fjord coloured in blue, and a red arrow with a “Here” pointing to the farm’s location at the end of a small road.

It read:

“Country: Iceland
City: Budardalur
Name: A horse farm with an icelandic/danish couple and 3 kids and a lot of sheep!
The danish woman works in a supermarket in Budardalur
Takk fyrir!”

And in 2015, a postcard sent from Missouri, the Belfast Telegraph recalled, with the not very helpful address of: “Albert, Cardonagh, Donegal”  successfully made it to Albert Doherty, an area councillor.

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A seemingly impossible task that year gave the posties another challenge, with a letter addressed: “Your man Henderson that boy with the glasses” sent from Belfast to the town of Buncrana in Donegal. The Royal Mail got it to its intended recipient, Barry Henderson.

Speaking to the Telegraph, Feargal Lynn said the envelope left him “laughing for around 10 minutes” and said the description on the front brought back “so many memories from my youth.”

He told the newspaper that “if it was anywhere else I imagine the posties would have just shredded it or returned to sender.

“I know the postman and so I think when he saw it he knew who that was, going by the detail.

“He told me he went into the main sorting office in Ballymena to get (the) post and that letter was sitting separate from everyone else’s. The main guy in the sorting office asked him if he had any idea who it was and he read it and knew it exactly who it was.”