A man has been left baffled after a letter arrived at his door which should have been delivered more than 10,500 miles away to an address in Australia.

When Keith Georgiou from Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, picked up the letter, he realised it should have been sent to an address in Penrith, New South Wales.

To add to the confusion, the Australian state had been abbreviated to NSW, meaning that only one word on the envelope matched Mr Georgiou’s address.

Royal Mail said mistakes were rare but did happen.

“How it got to Penarth instead of Australia is a joke, isn’t it,” the 60-year-old said.

Mr Georgiou spotted the letter over the weekend and saw from the envelope that it had been posted from the Exeter area.

“It’s obviously gone through a number of sorting offices and no-one has picked it up,” he said.

“It’s got the airmail sticker, everything correct on it, and it ends up in south Wales. It’s not even gone to Penrith [in Cumbria].”

Surprisingly, it is not the first time Mr Georgiou has received a letter that should have gone to Australia, but he said this week’s discovery was ironic, given the news about Royal Mail’s takeover and the fact that it was recently fined £10.5m for missing delivery targets.

“Even the postman delivering it to the house, you’d have thought he’d have gone ‘hang on a second’,” he said.

“It’s just not the same address. It’s sad that it’s got this far.”

Mr Georgiou has now re-posted the letter – having written a note on it informing Royal Mail of the mistake.

“Hopefully it doesn’t return back here!” he said.

Royal Mail said: “We deliver up to 35 million letters a day during December and occasionally mistakes happen.

“It appears that on this occasion a letter addressed for Penrith has been mistakenly read as Penarth… usually, any errors made by mail sorting machines are picked up by our team, but rarely, they are not noticed in time.”