A water bill, a pension statement and a dentist's reminder, all addressed to a name at flat 6 that nobody at flat 6 has ever heard of. Three organisations told me they have a live account at that address.
I have been a delivery officer for twenty nine years and I have had the same walk for nineteen of them.
A walk is not a list of addresses. It is a sequence, and you learn it in your hands. The frame in the office has a slot per address in the order you walk it, and you set your bundle into the frame in the morning and pull it out in walk order, and after a few months you stop reading the addresses at all.
What you do read is the names, because the names are the job. A name you do not know at an address makes you look. A name you do know at the wrong address makes you stop.
Flat 6 in the block on the corner has two names in my hands: the couple who have lived there since 2011, and a third.
I am going to call the third name Mr Adams, which is not it.
Mr Adams gets post at flat 6. Not constantly. Between eleven and twenty items a year, which is enough that I know the shape of the handwriting on the envelopes and the window positions on the printed ones.
I have been delivering to him since 1997 at that address, through four different sets of residents.
What he gets, because this is what makes it not a matter of somebody failing to redirect their mail.
A water bill, twice a year. Our local supplier's envelope, the one with the logo in the corner, the size they use for a statement.
A pension statement, once a year, in the spring, from a provider I will not name because it would narrow it down.
A dentist's recall card, every six months, from a practice two streets away.
And a Christmas card, every year, hand addressed, postmarked in the same city.
That is not dormant post. A water account that is not being paid goes to debt recovery and then to a solicitor and then it stops. A pension provider with an unclaimed pot writes once and then writes to a tracing agency. A dentist takes you off the recall list after two misses, because the list costs them money to print.
Those three organisations think there is a live person at that address, and they have thought so for twenty nine years.
The residents.
The couple at flat 6 have lived there fourteen years and they are lovely and they think the whole thing is funny, mostly.
They have done what anybody would do. For the first year they wrote not known at this address and put the items back in a postbox, which is the correct thing to do and which I told them to do.
It makes no difference. An item marked not known comes back to the sender and a sender who believes the account is live sends the next one anyway, and we are not allowed to stop delivering post that is correctly addressed.
In 2016 the husband rang the water company, which I only know because he told me about it on the step, and he was on the phone for forty minutes, and the answer he got was that they could discuss an account with the account holder and that he was not the account holder.
He asked whether they could confirm the account existed and they said they could confirm that an account existed at that address in that name and that there were two accounts at that address.
The addresses.
The block has eight flats, numbered 1 to 8, and has done since it was converted in 1974. Before that it was a large house and I do not know how it was divided.
Flat 6 is on the second floor, back left. One door, one letterbox, one set of people in it.
There is no 6A. There is no annexe. I have been in that hall thousands of times.
What I have done, inside the job, properly.
A name at an address with no redirection and no gone away is delivered. That is the rule and it is the right rule, because the alternative is postmen deciding who exists.
But there is a process for a repeated problem address. You raise it with your manager, it goes to the delivery office's address database, and somebody checks it against the Postcode Address File, which is the definitive list of every deliverable address in the country.
I raised it in 2009. The answer came back that the address was correct and deliverable and that the name was not relevant to the address record, which is true and which is how it works.
I raised it again in 2018 with a new manager who took more interest, and she did something I had not thought of, which was to look at whether a redirection had ever been set up on that name.
There has been one. It ran for three months in 1991, from that address, to an address in another county.
She would not tell me where and she was right not to. What she did tell me, because she was as unsettled by it as I was, is that the redirection was taken out in the name and that it expired and was never renewed.
The Christmas card is the one that made me write this down, and it took me nineteen years to do the obvious thing about it.
It is hand addressed, in the same hand every year, getting shakier. For the last six years it has been noticeably shakier and the 6 has been wandering.
It is postmarked in a city about sixty miles away and it comes in the second week of December.
Last year I did something I should not have done, which is that I held it. Not stole it. I put it in my own bag and delivered it the next morning, and in between I sat in my kitchen and looked at the back of the envelope, where some people write their own address, and where this person does.
So there is a name and an address, in the same shaky hand, sixty miles away.
I have not written to them and I am not going to, because what would I say.
What I did instead is look them up, and the name on the back of that envelope and the name on the front are the same surname, and the electoral roll says somebody with that name has lived at that address since 1968.
So once a year, somebody who has been alive since at least 1968 writes a Christmas card to Mr Adams at flat 6, and a water company bills him, and a pension provider tells him what his pot is worth, and a dentist asks him to come in for a check up.
And I put all of it through the door of a couple who will leave it on the hall windowsill with the rest.
The pile on that windowsill is eleven years deep. The couple will not throw it away and they have told me why, and it is the only sensible thing anybody in this story has said.
They said it is not theirs.