Is this your handwriting?

Got a message via WhatsApp from a friend in Ormskirk asking me the following: “Is this your handwriting and address?” Intrigued, I opened the photo and saw, to my amazement, it was. The photo was of a letter I had sent to an old friend, with whom I had worked a long time ago at Prescot Comp, but with whom I hadn’t been in touch for 20 years. I found a bunch of photos of him I wanted to send on, got a bounceback from his email address, so sent a couple on to his home in Ormskirk, with a terse note saying, “Oi, get in touch, been way too long.” His home address, I had got on line – and I recognised it from a long time ago, when we had last been in touch. Unfortunately, he has since moved.
 
Annie, my other friend in Ormskirk, had been in a “Things to do in Ormskirk when it is raining” Facebook group (or something like that), in which the current resident of the house to which I had sent the note and photos had posted a photo of the envelope I had sent, asking: “Does anyone know a LM and where they might live now?” Somewhat incredibly, she had recognised my handwriting and return address, and sent the image on. Even more incredibly, someone did indeed know LM and where is now residing. The note and photo were therefore redirected to the person in question. I just love coincidences like that. All that is needed now is for LM to have an almost incurable disease, something so difficult to cure that it takes a stem cell transplant from an obscure blood group of which I am the only other member, and we have a Jackie Collins novel.
 
Much of the day was spent either working on the New Zealand stuff, which is proving more impenetrable as time goes on, or preparing myself for Anna’s latest assault on my mobility at the gym. In hindsight, Anna’s was preferable. It’s quite astounding the difference I feel after three sessions. If it weren’t so bloody expensive, I’d sign up here and now for the year.
 
In the evening, I took Ottawacker Jr. to his football practice and spent the time, or most of it, in the car reading the last pages of the Roberto Firmino autobiography. It’s improved in parts, but it is still a disastrous book as far as I am concerned. It’s rare that I approach a memoir and am so disappointed by its content that I feel anger towards its author – but I am not far off with this one. I accept that, having recently read the Clive James memoirs and the superlative Gabriel Byrne autobiography, the bar might have been set impossibly high. But still. It’s meaningless crap, and there’s no getting away from it.