Homely amazon

Sometimes your book from amazon comes with an advice note printed on fancy stationery which includes a peel-off address panel which has been peeled off and stuck on the outside of the packet, perhaps with a couple of those funny yellow plastic strips underneath for good measure. Not unlike the stationery that they used, many years ago, to put into mainframe line printers for printing out sheets of address labels. With the balance of the advice note slipped inside the packet with the book.

Some members of the amazon family don't bother with the advice note business and just print out a label which they stick on the outside.

And then, just recently, we had a third variation.

We have been using Swish Deluxe curtain rails, fixtures and fittings for more or less the whole of our married life. Good gear and one can still buy spares, which is just as well, as the white plastic fittings do get a bit brittle after a few decades. Then last week I needed a stop, the thing that stops the curtains shooting off the end of the rail.

Down to Fabric World, which carries a huge range of curtain material and some curtain fittings, but not this one. Into the haberdasher across the road who suggests Homebase, rather too far to walk on this occasion. Into Wilkinson's where I had a near miss. Into Robert Dyas where I had another near miss. And another at Ponden Home (not quite a pound store). And that exhausted the shops in Epsom who might have such a thing.

Back to google, and he turns up a supplier in a few seconds, a supplier, a member of the amazon family, who will be pleased to sell me four stops, in two packs of two, for around £5 including postage. And in a couple of days time they turn up. One now fitted and three for stock.

The entertaining bit was that this supplier printed out an advice note on an ordinary piece of A5 paper, with the address top left. Then someone took an ordinary pair of scissors, cut out the address, none too neatly, brushed glue on the back and stuck it on the outside of the packet, slipping what was left of the advice note inside. Entirely reasonable, system worked. But it did strike me as rather homely. Slight whiff of the WI or of conservative ladies in a village hall, stuffing envelopes.