Remember the number 42 which is, in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything", calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years?
Unlike that particular answer to which no-one knew the question, my question of how to keep in touch with all those people I wanted to keep in touch with when I constantly kept changing places - listening to the Queen's New Year's Eve Message on the beach in New Guinea and on New Year's Day floating in a five-star hotel pool in Manama in Bahrain, or leaving Apia in Samoa on a Friday afternoon, overnighting on the island of Nauru, and starting work in Penang in Malaysia the following Monday - was to keep a permanent postal address at Box 42 at Duffy A.C.T. 2611.
That number was on the last and largest of forty-two postal boxes at a small suburban post office agency run by a Pom, Steve Dow, who once a week would squeeze all the letters received into my box into a large jiffy bag and mail it off to wherever was my very latest place of abode.
I regularly reimbursed him for the cost of the postage and jiffy bags, and also regularly sent him pretty postcards which he stuck to the wall, making the place look more like a travel agency than a post office.
Many years later, during an inspection by the postal authorities, he was told to dismantle the display, and many, many more years later - but not before I had permanently returned to Australia - the whole post office was dismantled, no doubt because the lack of my mail made the running of this tiny post office agency uneconomial. However, for almost two decades, Box 42 had provided me with an answer to almost everything.
