Although I'm currently in Holland, I am posting this story on Atlantic Lines, as it is firmly an island story. A blogger in North Uist posted an image of a parcel on her blog the other day. It had arrived in her home after an epic journey through Shetland and the Uists. The sender, a man in a small town in Germany, had misspelled the name of the island of Unst, calling it Uist instead. After the parcel had gone through nearly all the three postal code areas in the Uists (HS6, HS7 and HS8), the postman left it with someone sharing the same surname as the addressee. And she decided to enlist the help of the global community, of which I am (with everybody reading this) a member.
I looked up the sender's address and found a telephone number in an on-line German telephone directory. I rang it, and fortunately the man answering it spoke English, better than my German which is exceedingly rusty. He told me that the packet was in fact intended for a Shetland family. For reasons of privacy, I cannot go into details, but I managed to find full address details and a telephone number. These I forwarded to the lady in North Uist and the package should be on its way to Shetland by tomorrow.
