A Fish Called Wander

Ever since moving to our lovely house in Collington we have had an issue with deliveries. The problem is satnavs: you know, those wonderful devices that nowadays we can’t now imagine we ever lived without. For whatever reason, there are two South Roads, running parallel to each other, within half a mile, and we happen to live on one of them. Satnavs of all varieties have a tendency to send drivers to the wrong South Road. We have had phone calls from every sort of workmen and delivery driver unable to find us, or asking why we are not in, and we have had all sorts of goods left at the wrong 22 South Road, including my passport and over the years, a substantial quantity of fresh fish.

      Alex gets through a lot of fresh whole salmon sides for her cold fork buffets, and at the time of this story was ordering them from a major national fish supplier called M&J Seafoods. M&J had a serious staff retention issue – I mean serious – which meant we rarely got the same delivery driver twice. Each new driver, of course, was directed by their satnav to the other 22 South Road. So every other week, we would get a phone call from that week’s driver asking where we were, or why were we not answering the door?

      Some weeks however, the driver would not bother to contact us to check, but would simply leave the fish outside 22 South Road, but in the wrong village. Once the fish had failed to turn up on time, Alex would phone M&J, be told the fish had been left as instructed (even though it hadn’t), and would drive round to the next village to retrieve it. She would notice that the special instructions on the delivery note said as always NOTE: DELIVER TO SOUTH ROAD COLLINGTON NOT SOUTH ROAD BROADBY, and wonder yet again why M&J didn’t use drivers who could actually follow the basic instructions written out for them in big letters.

      My cycling buddy Lee was down, and the plan was to do a lengthy trip to the most southerly Good Beer Guide pub in Cambridgeshire, The Pig and Abbot at Abingdon Piggots. The semi-palindromic pub is not only friendly, welcoming and serves a nice pint of beer, but also has the best home-made pie suppers in the county, and being a Proper Northerner Lee likes his pies. We agreed that after she’d finished her prep for the day, Alex would drive down and join us for a meal, Lee and I would hook our bikes onto the rack and we would all drive home.

      A couple of days earlier there had been the usual Fish Incident, but with a twist: when Alex went round to 22 South Road Broadby to collect her mis-delivered fish, there was no salmon to be seen. She phoned M&J.
       “Are you sure the driver left the salmon?”
       “Yes, that’s what he says.”
      “Well it’s not at 22 South Road, either of them. Where did he leave it?”
      After tracing the driver M&J phoned back. “He says he left it at 22 South Road. On top of a wheelie bin.”
      “Well he didn’t. He needs to come back because only he knows where he actually left it.”
      But he didn’t come back, that day nor the next day, presumably because he was busy receiving a long service award from M&J for completing two full weeks with them.
      Alex tried again the following day, but there was no enthusiasm on their part to sort out the problem. It was midsummer, so we knew that within a couple of days everyone in whichever village the fish was residing would be well aware of the fact.

      And so a couple of days after that exchange that Alex was setting off to join us at The Pig and Abbot, Abingdon Piggots. She was getting into her car when a burly chap drove across the end of the drive, blocking it, and jumped out.
      “Are you Alex Carter? Your bloody fish is stinking out my house, and you’ve got to move it.” He had read the delivery label (well, at least somebody had), tried to phone M&J, got no answer, and seen Alex’s name and address on the invoice.
      The man refused to move, threatening Alex, until she agreed to go round and dispose of the salmon.   She phoned me to say she would be late meeting us. I couldn’t believe the way the guy was behaving, and told her as much. After all it wasn’t her fault. She had done her best to find the fish, and tell M&J they needed to deal with the problem. I wished I was there to confront him, but I was riding down a small lane towards Shingay Cum Wendy (yes, really) forty miles away, and more importantly Lee and I were about ten minutes from our first and well-earned pint.
      So Alex had no choice but to don her rubber gloves, arm herself with several bin bags and a shovel, and head round to the man’s house, which wasn’t either number 22, nor on a road with a name remotely like ‘South’. After clearing the maggot infest stinking mushy mess, she had to go home again, shower, and put all her clothes on a hot wash.

      I can understand the guy’s anger: he was in the process of selling his currently uninhabited house, which is why he hadn’t been round for several days, so I can see that adding complete with pustulating fish feature, and garden aromas of rotting seafood was not going to look good on the estate agent’s blurb. I never asked Alex to point out the actual house, because I couldn’t have stopped myself going round and having more than a word. I was furious.
      There’s always an upside to any situation, however, and by the time Alex turned up at the pub starving but only trailing a slight hint of Grimsby on a summer’s day, Lee and I were well away. We thought it best not to order the fish pie.

Notes