Card crosses Atlantic to the wrong LondonTue, December 18, 2007
By CLAIRE NEARY, SUN MEDIA
From London, England to London, Ontario, this Christmas card will be very late.
The card mailed from somewhere in England was supposed to go to one Mrs. L McCarthy of 18 Braemar Ave., Bounds Green, in London.
Instead, it made its way more than 5,800 kilometres across the Atlantic and into the hands of Mark Kearney, a University of Western Ontario writing teacher.
The city name was right -- London -- and the street address, 18 Braemar Cres., close -- but not the country.
"As tempted as I've been to open (the card), I'm not going to," said Kearney, who Googled the woman's name on the Internet, but found nothing.
"I just thought, 'So who is this lady?' But for now, she remains a mystery woman."
With so many streets in London, Ont., named after places in this city's English namesake, such gaffes -- especially when holiday mail loads soar -- aren't unheard of.
But with most mail now electronically sorted, such slip-ups are rarer, said Tom Dalby of Canada Post.
"Now that most of our mail is sorted by machines, it tends to get to the right person more frequently," he said.
"But with this card, someone who handled it here must have manually accepted it," Dalby said.
The card -- with no return address or date stamp -- arrived early last week, and because it came with other Christmas cards, Kearney almost tore it open.
But something about the stamp -- an image of the Queen, with the words "1st class"-- tipped him off that something was unusual.
Denise Braddon of the Royal Mail in England, the national postal service there, said she can't "fathom how it might have happened. That first-class stamp is only meant for in-land use."
Besides the address of the intended receiver, the only markings on the card envelope were a Royal Mail stamp on the back and a faint reference to Marks and Spencer, a British retailer where the card was presumably bought.
Searches of England's online phone directories and personal searches yielded nothing. But with the help of Kearney and Canada Post, Mrs. McCarthy-- whomever she is -- may get her card, after all.
Kearney plans to take the card to Canada Post to get it sent back across the ocean.
McCarthy should get her card in seven to nine days.
