Flat White

The sort of coffee I like is without sugar and with a little milk but not too much.  Someone I know is very specific about coffee made for her ... even down to the sequence of assembling the ingredients.  She swears she can tell if it's not made 'her' way.  If someone brings me a mug, I can usually tell by the colour whether I'm going to like it, but I wouldn't have a clue how they made it.  But regular readers will have guessed that I'm not writing this whole blog about coffee.

It's a busy time of year - quite apart from the General Election and all that has brought with it - as church and personal activities lead up to Christmas time.  Last weekend our vicar invited us to a party in the church hall to celebrate one of those 'big' birthdays and there were people there from her past life whom I didn't know and who didn't, of course, know me.  One of these saw my cross and asked me what was my role in the church.  The first thing that came to mind must have been a bit of a surprise to him.  I replied, "At the moment it's a distributor of Christmas cards!"

Three years ago, my friend and I discovered that we'd both delivered cards to the same street in the same day and one of us said to the other "We must be able to do better than this!"  During the following summer I helped for the first time in an election campaign office and discovered how they organised the distribution of election leaflets.  This was a system to cover the thousands of homes in a parliamentary constituency but, I reasoned, it should be possible to devise on a spreadsheet a pocket-sized version for the hundreds of homes in our parish.

As autumn progressed, the system came together and was launched for 2017.  After fine tuning - which is still ongoing - it was launched once more last Sunday.  At the party the previous afternoon, I had arrived in a car laden with lots of boxes containing bundles of cards which I later displayed in the church for collection after Sunday's services.  These were all prepared with the names of people who had allowed themselves to be persuaded in advance to deliver to specific walks covering a road or two, or parts thereof.  This seemed a better idea than the virtual free-for-all that had gone so spectacularly wrong before.

The fine weather today drew me forth to deliver my own small share in the plan.  I had opted for a small estate on the very edge of the town, overlooking the motorway.  Its white-walled and red-tiled houses are typical of our town and although they had always struck me as very welcoming as I'd seen them when driving home after a long day on the road, with their lights twinkling through the leafless trees on a cold evening, I'd never actually been in the road until today.

One of the problems of making deliveries, whether it's parcels, political leaflets or Christmas cards, is flats.  I've lost count of the times I've asked someone to deliver, only to meet the anxious reaction, "There aren't any flats, are there?"  I'm not sure whether it's the image of walking along isolated corridors, the fear of not getting into the building in the first place, or the knock-on admission of 'failure' to get rid of all their cards, but it seems few people want to deliver to flats.  In fact, this year, I put out a notice with the cards, advising people 'If you can't get in, don't worry; it's their loss and not your problem.'

Imagine my surprise then, when I discovered that 65% of those lovely white walled and red-tiled, light-twinkling signs of 'welcome home' were FLATS!  Not only that, but they are examples of the two different types of flats we deliverers are confronted with.  I've made notes, for whoever does that street next year.  nos. 6 to 15 (which, of course, may or may not include no. 13, but that's a topic for another day) are 'numbered access'.  In other words, by the door is a key-pad intercom by which the caller can enter the flat number and speak to the person he's visiting in order to be admitted.  Nos. 26 to 34 have a separate button for each flat (for the same purpose), but also a very useful 'trade button', by which there is access to the hallways and corridors, enabling leaflets and cards to be delivered quite successfully.

With my own instructions followed, and now feeling for myself that 'guilt' of failure, I returned home, with a small packet of undelivered cards to return to church tomorrow, along with a greater understanding of what I'm asking others to do.