Bad Manners and Brimstone

looking good so far!

Glad to hear it! Earlier on in this thread I did wonder, if he routinely sends parcels marked 'Gift' to you (and maybe other friends?) across the border, whether the customs guys had noticed this traffic and thought 'Ha! A dealer trying to dodge the duty by pretending his goods are gifts!' (a not-unusual ploy).

My DH was a UK customs officer when I first knew him, and had spent some time in postal customs. He says that everyone thinks of postal customs as a vast machine through which their parcel will be processed quite anonymously, whereas actually it's just a small group of people working together in a room. They do get to know regular shippers and the addresses they send to, recognise their parcels when they land on the bench, and can spot patterns in what they send. (That's how they nailed the British squaddie stationed on the Rhine who was trying to smuggle a submachine gun home to the UK by posting it to his mother one small component at a time.)

He had lots of stories about that job. About the padded bags full of diamonds that used to arrive from Amsterdam to addresses in Hatton Garden (the street in London where the trade in precious stones is centred). This seemed to me an amazingly unsafe way of shipping something so valuable, but he said no. If you entrust a packet of diamonds to a security company, or even send a trusted employee over with them, its journey is trackable, and a well-informed criminal gang can plan to waylay the carrier and rob them; but once a Jiffy bag is in the ordinary postal system, nobody knows precisely where it is or when it will arrive, so no plans can be made to steal it. (This was over 30 years ago, and I dare say diamonds are shipped differently now. But that's how it was routinely done back then, and a customs officer's day might entail pouring a pile of diamonds onto his bench and counting them out.)

Another 'trade secret' that I reckon it's safe to spill now; way back then, one of the most popular souvenir items sold in Australia was a soft-toy koala bear with a musical-box in its tummy that played 'Waltzing Matilda' when handled. The postal customs team loathed handling batches of parcels from Australia in the run-up to Christmas, because every sack was guaranteed to have at least half-a-dozen parcels containing one of these, and no matter how carefully you handled them you were nearly sure to set the d*mn thing going 'Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda...' and there was no way to stop it. The noise just drilled into your brain. It got so bad that when someone set one off the entire team would yell 'Aargh! Bury it!' and without further investigation the packet would be stamped, dropped into the onwards bin and have more parcels thrown in on top of it to muffle the noise. DH reckons that you could have smuggled just about anything from Australia into the UK in December in one of those toys; nobody had the fortitude to search them.