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Hong Kong's postal service is remarkable. It's reliable, swift, and so cheap that it's more cost-effective to mail a postcard to the UK from Hong Kong than it is from ... the UK. I don't know why I haven't taken advantage of this arbitrage opportunity, apart from because there isn't a large and liquid market of people wanting to subcontract their postcard writing. But if there is, I'll be ready and waiting.

Or rather, I though that the postal service was good. Good enough that for the last two years, I've saved a fortune through buying books on Amazon in the UK and having them posted to Hong Kong; life may be cheap in the Special Administrative Region, but more so if you like congee and you're illiterate, and less so if you enjoy Pret a Manger sandwiches and reading things other than the South China Morning Post and free magazines that can't parse"fucking" correctly.

However, I saw an interesting book on photography in Dymocks that I didn't fancy paying $480 for, and a children's book that Dymocks didn't even have in their system, so I ordered them from Amazon, and then waited. And waited. And waited.

After a month, I gave up, and ordered them again, this time from Amazon in the US rather than via my UK mail forwarding service (aka my long suffering parental units). And waited. And waited.

Until today, four working days after Amazon US said they'd have the books to me, when a parcel finally arrived. With the books from Amazon UK in it. Heaven knows when the other pair of books will arrive, at which point I'll have two copies of Visual Poetry, and two copies of a book that would feel slightly derivative of Harry Potter, if it wasn't for the fact that it was written in 1973.

It's a lovely book, with illustrations by the late Edward Gorey, but I'll have more to say on it tomorrow; tonight I'm a bit of a broken man, having done fifteen minutes on a different stepping machine (112 floors, apparently), sweat buckets al over the gym, and still managed to put on a pound in weight. I had to eat 'Seriously Knobbly Cookies' to cheer myself up, which is a bad sign, because the Seriously Knobbly Cookies are Seriously Foul.

Perhaps the cat will eat them for me.