Sometimes, throwing a letter into a mailbox can be like throwing it into a black hole. A few days ago, Jason Bevan, an eighty-year-old pensioner living in the small town of Lidney, almost 200 kilometers west of London, lamented in the letters to the editor section of the Daily Telegraph about the unreliability of Royal Mail, the iconic British postal service. His wife, to whom he had been married for fifty-eight years, died in January and the man explained: "I received many condolence cards and was expecting more after an announcement in the local press. However, I didn't receive any mail all week."