Grumpy Oldie Man
Matthew Norman
In my elegant part of west London (the crack-dealing tourist quarter of equatorial Shepherd’s Bush), the postal service seems to have taken semi-retirement at best – though nine-tenths retirement feels closer to the fractional truth.
For all the exquisiteness of the rhyme, ‘snail mail’ seems apt only if the gastropod in question had the mobility of a 108-year-old with acute rheumatoid arthritis.
Weeks and weeks sidle by without the doormat’s being troubled. With the curious exception of insolent demands for income tax, letters take so long to work through the filtration system that it would be no surprise to find them stamped with a Penny Black.
The sadness, of course, is that any mail arrives at all. Apart from the Revenue’s impertinent show of greed, the only letters to have pitched up in the last month appeared to have nothing whatever to do with the stated recipient.
The only discernible relevance was that the envelopes bore my name and address. What lay within made any sense only in the context of extreme amnesia, and even then barely at all.
It is possible that, in early January (according to missives delivered in late February), I took out two mobile-phone contracts with the network known simply as ‘3’.
Why, if so, is beyond me. Being neither a drug-dealer nor a sex worker – though it remains early doors on those career options – I find one mobile suffices. Whether even a pusher or a hooker would have wanted to bolster the tally with yet another, this one with Tesco Mobile, I cannot say. But I, apparently, did.
Among other letters to dodge the cordon sanitaire was a welcoming note from Next, the fashion chain, with a card enabling the purchase of garments on credit; and an epistle from TSB – with which I have the misfortune to bank – bearing the debit card for a new account.
What lies ahead is thrillingly unknowable. But I have hopes of learning that the Soviet nuclear warhead I bought off the dark internet is on its way from its silo in Turkmenistan, and of being firmly advised to have the ceilings raised to accommodate the giraffe newly dispatched from the Serengeti.
Assuming that I haven’t become startlingly amnesiac (a dangerous assumption, plainly, since I would have no recollection of that), the diagnosis seems plain. I am the victim of that most engaging modern crime, identity theft.
The irony here is that, had the criminal had the courtesy to contact me before using my name and date of birth to unlock this treasure trove, I’d have added my mother’s maiden name to the roster of purloined info to negate any need for theft. I would have put my identity in a ribboned box, and gladly handed it over as a gift.
Not a soul in the same postal code as their right mind, and few in their wrong one, would care for my identity. In the event of a prosecution, the foolproof defence against the charge of stealing my persona would be insanity. No 12 good people and true would convict. You’d be lucky, in fact, to convene a jury to hear such a charge.
But of course there won’t be a prosecution. The notion of even reporting this to the Metropolitan Police lies in the realm of comic fantasy. It’s up there with the annual list of the silliest reasons people ring the emergency services: I’ve run out of baking soda; after drinking 14 pints of Stella, my boyfriend can’t get it up; Philip Schofield’s just come on the telly and I can’t find the remote.
Were I to take the satirical step of mentioning this to the Feds, it’s even money the response would start with a snigger. A record would wearily be taken and, a few days later – what the hell am I writing? a few years later – a letter would arrive offering therapy for traumatic stress.
All the trauma and every ounce of the stress lay not in the victimhood, but in the misery involved in alerting the various companies. Too often have you read about, and no doubt experienced, the agonies of the call centre to need refreshing about that.
Suffice it to say that six and a half hours were required, and that TSB was sufficiently ashamed of itself to stick £30 in my account as compensation. Which account was not specified. On the form book, it will probably be the one opened by my impersonator.
The complaint to the postal service about the tardiness, on the other hand, was taken relatively promptly and handled with the appearance of genuine concern. I will be hearing from their investigators shortly, I was told.
‘If they plan to put their findings in writing and post them in the form of a letter,’ I said, ‘I’d be grateful if they would address it to my estate.’
My identity will have been appropriated by death, a rather more effective thief than any mobile-phone hoarder in a Next jacket, long before it arrives.