A salutory tale

When I worked in Nottingham in the 1970s one of my colleagues had three lady friends. In those days there were no laptop or desktop computers, no e-mails and no mobile telephones, so communication was limited to letters and land line calls.

My colleague was a lecturer for the Open University and met his ladies initially at study weeks. One lived in Newcastle, another in Poole and the third in West Bromwich.

One day I entered his office and he was banging his head on a desk. Apparently he had written to his three ladies but was convinced he had put the wrong letter in each of the three envelopes he had posted. I managed to convince him that the Post Office would not permit him to retrieve the letters when the postbox was emptied and that strong-arm tactics would be frowned upon.

My thought that possibly one letter had been placed in the correct envelope cheered him up somewhat. But it was not to be. Back to the drawing board.