Deliveries

A bit of traffic to our front door this week. First was a new monitor for my PC, delivered from Amazon the day after I ordered it. Good, eh? Next was a new piano stool that Martyn had ordered. By the time I'd got downstairs to answer the door, the wretched delivery man had taken it to our long-suffering next-door neighbour. I suppose everyone's under pressure to achieve more deliveries per hour these days. Keeping the best for last, Martyn's new piano arrived on Thursday. It's a digital job, and he's very impressed with the progressive touch, as well as the range of voices and whizzo special effects. And we hadn't realised that it came with a matching piano stool... Not a problem: we can now pension off the lethal folding stool (it tips over far too easily) that he uses at his keyboard.

I suppose a lot of goods have always been delivered to the door, but I'd be interested to know what impact on-line ordering has had. My impression, from the number of vans I see whizzing past the house, is that courier deliveries have multiplied like rabbits. We see a lot of grocery deliveries as well, and if fuel prices continue to rise at the present rate, we may be taking a look at that too. In my childhood, most grocers delivered, and indeed I made a bit of money driving a local grocer's deliveries after school. (Vauxhall Victor estate car with a 3-speed column-change gearbox. Dreadful thing: it quite poisoned my mind to steering-column gear levers until my lovely old Renault 16 showed just how good a good one can be.) But with the growth of the supermarkets and the consequent killing off of so many independent High Street grocery businesses, home deliveries disappeared for a couple of decades.

But it's justice I'll be hoping to deliver next week: I have a 2-day appeal at the Crown Court. My sittings are so few and far between at the moment that I've pretty well forgotten how it's done. Still, 'iz 'onner will do the talking, so the audience will be spared my gaffes.