Recorded account: P. Amit

— The reconciliation is a fortnight of arithmetic and I would not romanticise it. What I can tell you about is the post, because the post is where the arithmetic comes from and nobody writes about it.

— We moved the office out of the old address in the spring of 1991. Everything was notified: the houses, the bank, the suppliers, the diocese, the two circles. And the correspondence kept arriving at the old address for four years. Some of it was addressed in hands I knew and some of it was not.

— The redirection worked, mostly. What I would note is that a number of the redirected envelopes came back to us already opened, and slit cleanly, with file marks inside — a receipt stamp, a reference number in the margin, the sort of thing an office does when it has actioned something.

— I raised it with the old office and they said it was ours. I raised it with ours and they said it was theirs. I have both replies and they are equally certain and equally polite. Ordinary mishandling would explain it; a shared reference series would explain it; somebody covering for a clerk would explain it. I have not established which.

— What mattered at the time was that the work in the envelopes was real work with dates on it. A roof, a fund transfer, two requests from the circle at Antigonish. So we did it. It was the relevant fact in front of us, and I would do the same again.

— I appreciate that is not a satisfying answer. Running a house is largely a matter of doing the work that has arrived and declining to build a theory around the envelope.