Stand and deliver

As we glide serenely into the most pleasurable time of year in Andalucía and the clouds make a welcome, if tentative, return, even school teachers would be hard pressed to find any reason to complain. These are the days when things get done and, what's more, it's a pleasure to do them.

Having dragged ourselves around the province during July and August coated in a perma-film of perspiration, stopping at every corner shop/bar/kiosk available to guzzle refreshments, we can now return to leisurely strolls with clear objectives that might actually be achieved, as opposed to shelved for another day with a resigned shrug of the shoulders and yet another welcome glug of lemonade.

I'm really hoping this can-do attitude might even extend to delivery drivers. Out in the villages around here, the regular postal service can be - now then, how might we put this? - unpredictable. If that wasn't enough, private delivery companies are considerably worse. In recent attempts to receive parcels long overdue, my activities have included lurking outside central delivery offices, waiting to pounce on the first vulnerable employee to emerge from the shadows and taping my phone number to a wall in the hope that a passing man with a parcel might stop to give me a tinkle, rather than head back to his van because he didn't like the look of the slope on the hill ahead.

Currently, I'm waiting for an oven, a rug, a bed and a sofa plus some long-overdue magazines which I suspect are gathering dust amid an array of half-eaten sandwiches and Cheetos packets in the bowels of a Correos office somewhere east of here.

Of course, in my more empathetic moments, I can see clearly that being a delivery driver must be a difficult and stressful job (in fact I was one for a couple of years and indeed it was). Mostly, though, I just picture a man in a van eating his dinner, staring perplexedly at his satnav, puffing out his cheeks and shaking his head before throwing a crust out of the window and heading back to the office.

The three different companies I'm currently beholden to, all have constellations of one star reviews online that would be enough to sink any other type of business but it seems that there's nobody doing a good enough job with delivery services to take the market by storm. Well, there's nothing for it, it looks like I'll need to do a bit more central delivery office lurking this afternoon.

Oh, hang on, that's my phone. Must dash - it might be a man with an oven.

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