Erikka Askeland: Festive deadlines can be hard ones to meet

ONE of my favourite quotes is courtesy of the late, great author of that four-part trilogy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (If you are short a stocking stuffer, I’d seriously recommend the omnibus. I laughed ‘til it hurt).

Douglas Adams (for it is he) was known to have suffered with occasional, serious bouts of writer’s block. So he wrote: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Making my crust as a journalist who has deadlines breathing their foul, hot stench down my neck most days, I should eschew such an attitude. But the opposite is the case, and I have actually become institutionalised to the extent I can’t get anything done unless my brow is glistening anxiously with a cold sweat in the final minute.

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It’s bad news for anyone of my acquaintance who might expect to get Christmas presents from me in the post on time. And this is even after a lifetime spent thinking that maybe this will be the year I send Christmas cards, and then signally failing to give a rat’s netherparts that I don’t.

Yet I still can’t solely buy things online to be dispatched to my loved ones, efficient as that may be. Instead I maintain the habit of wandering aimlessly around shops, my eyes blurring what I see into a soft focus until something swims into view that strikes me as being appropriate for the person I am shopping for.

This may come as some relief to high street shops, which otherwise seem to be dying on their tired, standing-at-a-till-all-day feet. Except for maybe Poundland and John Lewis – the latter for the few remaining members of the British middle classes, the former for the rest of us.

But as is my wont, I woke in the night this week worrying about the Royal Mail Christmas deadline for sending packages to Mum and Sis. The package is ready, give or take a few items that I hadn’t yet had whack me between the eyes with aptness.

But it has to be in the post ASAP. Or else I will face not endless ignominy, but worse: the contented resignation among some members of my family that I’m just not cut out for the rigours of festive organisational skills required for the female of the species.

It all brings back a painful memory. It was a few years ago and inside the box to be posted were some judiciously chosen and well-wrapped gifts, and an album lovingly put together full of pictures of my latest flat in order to show Mum, who had yet to visit.

But come postal deadline day I was frantic, and just made the Post Office in a sweaty rush before it shut. I thought nothing more of it until days before Christmas, when the box was returned to me looking a little worse for wear at the office where I worked.

Dear reader, it was a Christmas miracle. For not only had I not added a return address to the package, but I had actually, stupidly, forgotten to put on an address on it at all.

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You can say what you like about folk who work at the Royal Mail, but this incident convinced me that at least some of them are as near to saints as you can find on this earth.

Clearly my box had landed somewhere in the bowels of the sorting office of last resort, where a member of staff had patiently pored through its contents to find some way to reach me or its proper destination.

It came down to an afterthought of mine, having tucked my business card in the last page of the album, which this kindly Royal Mail worker noticed and used to dispatch by package back.

Of course, it didn’t make it to Mum on time for Christmas that year. But instead of being upset, we all laughed, because really we are not the sort of people whose joy at Christmas relies solely on the timely arrival of a few knick knacks.

And I’m fortunate that my proneness to such gaffes is indulgently considered endearing. As long as it doesn’t happen again.

So I’m off to the post office. I’ve got a deadline to make.