Tony Bunce has received a seaside postcard from his sister - more than SIX YEARS after she sent it to him.

The card, posted from Jersey in August 1995, was delivered to Mr Bunce at his home in Montgomery Road, Hove, last week.

He said: "I had spoken to my sister the week before last and she had not said anything about going away. So at first I thought they must have gone there on the spur of the moment.

"But as I read down the card I realised this was not the case. It was all about golf and lovely weather, which I realised in February could not possibly be. So I looked at the postmark and the date was Wednesday, August 16, 1995."

Mr Bunce, 66, said: "I have never had any post that has taken longer than a week to get to me before.

"Postcards are so thin that it probably slipped down the back of somewhere."

A spokesman for Consignia, the parent company which runs Parcel Force, Royal Mail and the Post Office, said: "We do have incidents of this kind happening throughout the country.

"The equipment and offices are regularly maintained so it is impossible for the card to have just been lying around for six and a half years.

"What usually happens is that these things are re-posted through our system. This means that it would have originally gone through the system in 1995 as it has a stamp on it but would have somehow ended up going through again.

"We do not know what journey that postcard would have taken during the six-and-a-half years."