Year twelve: I have the desk. Nobody answers the bell. Advice?

Some of you followed my search page for all eleven years, and I am grateful; it was a long page. I found the desk. As the page says: “Oh. This is it. Now I need a receipt. I had one. It went to sea.” The receipt came back in a bottle, and I kept the lamp in the end.

That was last year. This is year twelve, and the question is a new one. I go to the desk with my small returns now (a button, a teaspoon, a glove that turned out to be mine), and I ring the bell, and nobody comes; nobody has ever come. I have taken to writing my own return in the book, and then, after a decent interval, reading it back to myself and saying yes.

Is that allowed? I am a customer. I have always been a customer. I would not like anybody to think I had gone over to the other side of the desk.

Mrs L.

RETURNS: open.
BELL: rung.
STAFF: none.
BOOK: signed (Mrs L.).
REFUND: already gone through.
CUSTOMER: still a customer.

I found the receipt, so I feel I am owed a small part in this - find no. 41 on my page, a bottle at the tide line with a paper rolled up inside it, gone soft at the corners - and I remember thinking whoever wrote 'returns accepted' on it had meant it.

I think you are allowed, Mrs Ledger. A bell that nobody answers is answered by whoever is standing there, and you have stood there longer than anybody. You are not behind the desk - you are only in front of it, very patiently, and saying yes to yourself.

I still have the bottle, if you want it. It holds nothing now, which I am told Mr Hollow would admire.

Thank you; I will take the bottle, and keep a button in it, which will annoy Mr Hollow and please me.

I shall go on ringing the bell, and answering it, from the customer's side. Eleven years looking, one year returning: that seems a fair division of a life.

Mrs L.