Holiday Mishaps

I hope this makes you smile:

We were due to go to the Isle of Wight for a week’s holiday last Saturday week. Debbie had booked the holiday cottage. She gave me the dates. I duly booked the ferry. On the preceding Wednesday, she checked the papers. It wasn’t a Saturday to Saturday booking after all, but Friday to Friday. A desperate call to the company with whom we booked the ferry ensued. After speaking to the ferry operator, we were rebooked onto a ferry at 6:30 pm on the Friday evening. It had to be that late, because I was already covering a funeral that lunchtime for a colleague who was away on a Boys’ and Girls’ Brigade camp.

After the funeral, I got home and a frantic Debbie asked me to change as quickly as possible. There had been a crash on the M25 (the London orbital motorway/car park for international readers) at 7:30 that morning, on part of the stretch we would be driving. The motorway was closed. With Debbie at the wheel and me navigating, we improvised a route off the M25 as soon as possible. However, wherever we went south of the motorway, we hit gridlocked towns. Tonbridge and East Grinstead were two of the worst.

We arrived at the ferry port at 8:10 pm. ‘Oh, there have been hundreds of you today,’ said a kind staff member. Just get in the queue for the next ferry. We sailed on the 8:30 pm crossing, with two children who would by now normally be fast asleep.

Just as we were about to disembark at 9:15 pm, my mobile phone rang. It was the delivery driver from Tesco. We had ordered online a grocery delivery at the holiday cottage for between 9 and 11 pm, expecting we would have arrived there around 7:30! He offered to make his one other delivery of the night, and then meet us at the store. We didn’t make it in time. I rang Tesco’s online headquarters in Dundee. They – to my considerable surprise and pleasure – said they would refund the cost of the shopping. They arranged for it to be delivered again the next day, between 5 and 7 pm.

But the next day, by 7:15 pm, the shopping hadn’t arrived. Another phone call to Dundee. This time, an embarrassed Tesco employee at the other end. Yes, they had delivered our shopping, but not to our holiday address on the Isle of Wight. It had gone to our manse in Chelmsford.

The holiday improved after that. In the meantime, if any of you can think of creative applications of this story as sermon illustrations, over to you! Any ideas?

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