Christmas card’s 10,000-mile trip

A CHRISTMAS card has been delivered more than three months late – after Royal Mail mistakenly sent it halfway round the world to the South Atlantic.

Roger and Margaret Curtis live in the village of St Helens, near Ryde on the Isle of Wight. Their friends in Wroxhall, just ten miles away, posted them the card in December.

But it was incorrectly dispatched to St Helena – a remote, storm-buffeted volcanic outcrop with a large colony of penguins. It finally arrived at their home last week, having travelled around 10,000 miles.

A message stamped on the envelope declared ‘missent to St Helena’.

St Helens, with a population of 1,200, claims to be the second largest village in the UK. Meanwhile the island of St Helena has a population of 4,500, and was uninhabited when discovered by the Portuguese in 1502.

French ruler Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled there in 1815 and died there just over five years later.