I just got another visit from the police. This time, the post office had x-rayed a letter addressed to me and discovered a suspicious brown powder. They handed it over to the police who tested it for controlled substances and didn't find anything, and the police delivered it, asked what it was (brine shrimp eggs, to feed my axolotls) and got me to sign something to say that I'd received it.
That is unbelievable, Peter. Were the brine shrimp eggs inside a foil packet in the envelope before they started messing around with them or were they loose inside the envelope?
They were in a resealable polythene pocket within the envelope. The envelope and polythene pocket had been cut open to extract a sample for testing, and the eggs, envelope and pocket had been placed in one of the Royal Mail 'oops, we mangled your post' bags, which was then sealed in a police evidence bag, which is what I had to sign. I bought them on ebay, so the eggs weren't in branded packaging and the sender hadn't included a return address or any indication of the contents of the package, and I'm not too shocked that an unidentified brown powder from an anonymous sender would attract that kind of attention.
It's funny, though. These are paranoid times.
Thirty years ago, long before the interwebs, a friend of mine who lives in Finland would send me home-made gun powder in the mail. He spent months perfecting the formula and every now and then he would send me a sample of the latest batch.
Nobody reacted, not once.
