If you had to deliver a replacement Caxton currency card to your teenage daughter trekking in the foothills of the Himalayas where do you think the stumbling block might be? Put it this way I presume you would agree with me that sending it via DHL would be the best way to proceed, but getting the card from Katmandhu to Major Lalitbahardur Gurung, Executive Director of the Gurkha Welfare Scheme at his office situated just off Gyan Marga road in Pokhara could be where things might go awry. Well that’s what I at least was worried about when I wandered into WH Smith’s shop ( DHL’s service agent ) on the High Street in Newmarket last Saturday morning. I have the shipping document stamped at 11.09am to prove it. But the Nepal leg of this card’s journey is going to be a dawdle compared to what happened next. I’m not even joking.
It’s too boring a story to go into much detail. Suffice to say it’s all WH Smith’s fault. They sat on the package – probably dumped a pile of newspapers or a carton of Cadbury’s Cream eggs on it – but in any case they had also failed to get me to fill out the requisite custom declaration which compounded the problem. So it was not until Wednesday afternoon, when it should have been winging into Tribhuvan International Airport, that the said card actually managed to get out of Newmarket down the road to DHL’s Cambridge depot. If for some strange reason you are reading this email looking for a bit of investment insight you might ask yourself, why does WH Smith even exist? If I was a shareholder I would be running for the hills. To be honest, DHL are hardly blameless in this little escapade, but at least they have refunded me the £36 courier costs and so taken were they by my tales of the penniless Jimmy’s woes in Nepal that they are sending her directly a goodwill gesture of £70! How about that?! She was the clot who left her card on the back seat of a Kolkata taxi because she is too vain to wear a money belt. Hardly does much to restore my mood. My poor colleague Peter, who sits next to me, has had to endure three days of my muttering and cursing and if you bumped into me at all earlier this week, well even you, dear client, probably found me not my usual equanimous self for which I can only apologise.
Apart from a couple of conversations with the Gappie on the cursed subject above as usual little is forthcoming, least of all photos. When I spoke to her last she told me she was sitting in the famously picturesque mountain village of Daman with the Himalayas, including a fine view of Mount Everest, stretching across the horizon. And that the following morning she was intending to climb up to a vantage point to watch the sunrise. There’s a romantic in there somewhere, but when I asked if she would send me a photograph she said she had decided, despite the fact that she was going trekking in the most beautiful countryside imaginable, to leave her camera behind in Pokhara. I mean what’s that all about??
I did get out of her that she will be leaving Nepal next week. She and a friend are heading to India to see the Ganges which she tells me she is particularly looking forward to given that, as you may recall, she spent the first four weeks of her GAP year lounging around St Lucia. It appears she thinks The Ganges are an Indian sect, distantly related to the Rastafarians, who spend much of the day chilling in a haze of smoke on the banks of a big river.
Supper tonight? Well Bob is back on holiday and surprisingly, given that he is meant to be revising solidly for his upcoming GCSE’s, a bag of 8 pigeons is at the back door waiting to have their breasts removed and gently pan fried. Lucky us.
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