« Is that all there is? » I asked my daughter as she handed over what looked suspiciously like an electricity bill and a bank statement. “Yeah, it hasn’t arrived,” she said, her eyes mirroring what was surely my own disappointment. Then she broke into a wide grin, pulled the small box from behind her back and handed it over.
I looked at it in stunned disbelief. It felt deliciously heavy in my hands and I was struck by the strangeness of it all. What sort of dark pact had Amazon made with the French Post Office? Having lived in the Alps for fourteen years, I was unable to remember a single occasion when something had been delivered on time.
The village isn’t on most maps and our quartier isn’t on any. A 24 hour delivery means sometime next week if you’re lucky and if the lorry driver can find you. As for La Poste, the service is so erratic and the staff often so cantankerous, that some days I wonder if we are not just a farm too far; too remote an outpost for their little yellow cars.
But today, only 9 hours after its release, it was here on my lap, under the jealous gaze of my daughter, who despite her fluency in English couldn’t read a word. I knew that Harry Potter was good at making things appear but I would never have imagined that La Poste possessed the same skills. A strange phenomenon indeed.
This post was inspired by Sunday Scribblings prompt: phenomenon. A little late I admit, but I did need to finish afore mentioned book first
The mountain dweller 
HAH! Such is the power of Harry Potter and JK Rowlings!
Do you know, even though L has read them (or, earlier, had them read to her) all (7 was vanquished this weekend), I’ve yet to read one of them?
what a great place it must be… mail on time or no… i live in the mountains of northern california… but ours look like the foothills compared to you…..
Yay for on time deliveries! With the help of a google map, I helped a delivery man find an address today that was not on our small town map. I hope it was someone else’s HP book arriving on time.
Impressive. I live in Charlotte, NC and didn’t get my book until 5:00…UPS delivered to our apartment’s office instead of to our door!! We were just waiting and waiting all day!!
Maybe if we were a little more remote we wouldn’t have had to wait!! LOL!
Hmm, would be nice if JK could use her powers to improve the postal services in her home town…..
Maybe if they used owl mail…:D
As a fellow sufferer in France I appreciate this rare occurrence.
Well I can certainly relate with you about La Poste, and I live in Paris! But yep, some magic was worked last Saturday.
My kids stayed up until midnight to purchase it and the Middle Child stayed up for two nights and we tossed sandwiches and water into her room to sustain her during the reading. Now it is being passed through the family. During a recent multi-family vacation, one of the husbands was reading the book and we had a contest going to distract him, as he was so absorbed. You got double points if Mr.S actually spoke to you!
LOL! Wow. Jealous. I had to go back to my post office twice as they had issues with my girlfriend’s copy.
In short we did not get our book until four days after it was supposed to be delivered. 😦