Way back in the mists of time (December 2004 actually), I was using this very space to bitch about the Department of Transport for failing to reply to a blustering e-mail I had sent two weeks previously.* At the time I thought it was a particularly futile demand, asking someone in authority to explain how National Toll Roads could be allowed to create a roadblock (i.e. the Westlink bridge) to extract ever-higher levies from drivers. (I was nearly going to lapse into appropriate tabloidese there and write ‘long-suffering motorist’).It seems I spoke too soon. Like something out of Borges story, a reply to my forgotten mail has just wandered out of the ether and into my inbox. Composed by a mandarin from the Road Policy Division, it contained nothing I hadn’t read in a newspaper back in December. But I’m really intrigued by the process that could have somehow generated a lengthy reply four months after one was requested. Perhaps in the Department there is a communication system like something out of the film Brazil, with ducts and pipes carrying messages through the bowels of the building. Any maybe the canister containing a rolled-up printout of my question got stuck in a pipe, and has only just recently been dislodged.Well, have you got a more reasonable explanation? *As people who know me could tell you, I am slowly turning into Victor Meldrew.