Daily Blague

It's Friday morning, and I'm elated. Why? Because I went to the Post Office. I lugged three boxes to the Post Office and got rid of them. That's perhaps not the nicest way to speak of books and tapes that I hope that the recipients will be glad to have. But it certainly describes my relief. For weeks - months - I've been haunted by a self-imposed project that at times seemed quite daft.

At the beginning of May, a young man from Manila posted a comment at the DB. I replied by email, and we struck up a very agreeable correspondence. Early on, it occurred to me that the most satisfying way of downsizing my library would be to send things that I probably wouldn't be re-reading to Migs. Books in English are very expensive in his part of the world, as I learned when I visited Swindon's, the bookstore in Kowloon that sells them. There isn't much of a market for English literature in English, obviously, and books are heavy. Ergo: Migs scouts the used-book stores.

Easier was definitely said than done. I hate the Post Office. The only way to describe our branch is "Stalinesque." So I won't describe it. A bigger snag was my neurotic conviction that I must coordinate the shipment of books with the cataloguing of my library. My procrastinations will be much too familiar, and far too boring, to write about. Suffice it to say that last night, in a sort of positive hissy fit, I assembled seventeen books - they just fit in the box that I'd commandeered - swiped their barcodes so as to enter them into my library, shelf location "Manila," at the very moment of their departure from it, and sealed the box with stout tape. It was only then that I realized that I didn't have Migs's address. A note dashed off to him brought a swift reply.

I had two other boxes to send. One was the return of a cookbook; I'd been sent a form to paste onto the box for hassle-free mailing. The other was the boxed set of Mapp and Lucia II, on VHS. I'd replaced this with DVDs, for storage purposes - the DVDs will go straight into an album, alongside the two discs of the first series. I'd have put the tapes out on the windowsill by the elevators - a custom I began years ago for recycling books that has taken on a life of its own - if a reader of this blog hadn't written to me privately to say that, unaware of a second series, she would have to search for it at her public library. Heavens, I wrote back, let me send them to you instead! I suppose it's narcissistic, but I am always much happier to give things away when I know where they're going. (Or at least, where they're going next.)

The Manila box (shades of the Manila galleon) weighed sixteen pounds and five ounces - a big baby indeed! - and it cost seventeen something to ship, a little over a dollar a pound. I was amazed. Another test of my eager generosity was finding out just how expensive it was going to be to play Lord Bountiful. To send a very heavy box of books around the world - what would we be talking? Forty dollars? Sixty? More??? I resolved to see this first shipment through at any cost, and then to tell my new friend that further shipments would be just too expensive. But $17.85 was an outrageous bargain. I had to fill out a customs slip (hadn't thought of that), and I was careful to bring a few more of the forms home with me. There will be further shipments.

I must have mailed something abroad in the past, but I don't recall ever filling out a customs slip. It's a simple matter where books are concerned, because books, Lord love 'em, are duty-free, as well they should be. But what caught my attention was the gigantic rough but clear plastic bag that the box was dumped into. The postage was attached to a large address label, which I also had to fill out, that was tied around the neck of the bag. I don't understand the bag at all. Surely the box will go to the Philippines on a container ship; all that plastic will bunch up inefficiently and be difficult to pack. But without the bag, where will the label (and the postage) go? We can only wait six weeks (months) for Migs's report.

Pound for pound, I paid less on shipping to Manila than on the postage to Pittsburgh!

And then I bought a lot of stamps - more, perhaps, than I'll be able to use before the next hike. The Super Heroes above, however, may get framed.