A letter addressed to a school a mile away has finally been delivered - following a 16,000 mile round trip to Thailand.

Shamim Ahmed needed to pay for his children's tuition fees at Ridgefield school in Cambridge, so he promptly stuck a first class stamp on the envelope, and assumed the letter would arrive within a day or two.

He got increasingly worried as the weeks went by, and the school started phoning him for payment.

So two months later, Shamim was forced to pay the school in cash - only for the letter to arrive, complete with a Thailand postmark.

Shamim Ahmed with his missing letter: 'No-one ever believes you when you say "your cheque is in the mail" but in this case it really was true'

Shamim, who works as a waiter at the Taj Tandoori restaurant in Cherry Hinton, sent the letter to Ridgefield school on January 4 this year.

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Yah gotta laugh at that one, Boater. You can't make this stuff up. And, you can't blame Thailand. However, I just wonder if the man wrote the proper address ledgibly. I used to work part time sorting mail in the Canadian office when I was going to university. It was always a puzzle trying to figure out what the people had written in various scripts. Some only said ..."To John Smith in London, Ontario"

Actually, in Thailand your mail often arrives sooner than expected. In 1997 I made plans to meet a young women at the airport in Sakhon Nakhon on an early monday morning flight. She wasn't there to meet me and I got a taxi ride into town and found a hotel listed in my Lonely Planet book. I had the woman's address and I wrote a letter in Thai when I got to my hotel, and said where I would be for the next 4 days. I pointed to where the stamp should be and handed it to the receptionist who couldn't speak English, but knew what I wanted. She phoned a bike rider who took off with my letter. The next afternoon my lady friend turned up at my hotel. She had got the dates and time mixed up and arrived at the airport one day late. She got back home to find my letter waiting for her. It had been delivered to the country address in less than one day's time. It reminded me of mail delivery in Canada 50 years ago before modernization.

When I lived in Hong kong, I not infrequently got letters chopped "Missent to HoChiMinhCity", "Missent to Bangkok" etc.

In Thailand they just don't arrive. I did get one registered letter seven months late.

I had the woman's address and I wrote a letter in Thai when I got to my hotel, and said where I would be for the next 4 days. I pointed to where the stamp should be and handed it to the receptionist who couldn't speak English, but knew what I wanted.

How can you write Thai, but not speak it...?