Dining table, off Hessle Road, ten past four

Ivy KerslakeRight. Front room, and I want it up before Whitsun, so don't tell me six weeks. Eleven yards a piece, twenty-one inch wide, that's what they all are, yes? Same as it was in fifty-six? Good. Then it's all arithmetic and I can do arithmetic.

Ceiling's eight foot six. Say eight nine cut, with the trim. Eleven yards is thirty-three foot. Four drops. Four drops out of every piece and threepence of nothing wasted — that's your free match ones, the grasscloth-looking. Now turn to that big trellis. Twenty-five and a quarter repeat, half-drop. Four drops? Not a chance. Three. Three drops out of the same length of paper. So it's the same money per piece and it is not the same money for my room, is it. Say it again so I've got it.

Doreen's had the trellis. Bay window's worth. She's mentioned it, oh, four times since Easter, and every time it's a bay does eat the paper, Ivy. Well it does, doesn't it, that's my point — you count a bay in the perimeter and then some, you don't knock it off. A door you can knock off. A flat window you count anyway because I'm not having you three inches short over the pelmet in June.

That striped one, 3106 — no. That's a hospital corridor, that is. Next.

Now. Turn back to 4419. The little sprig, in the rose. That one. That is the one. I saw it and I said to our Ken, that's the front room done. And it's got a stamp across the bottom of it saying no further batches. Read it out again for me, I want to hear you say it.

Batch numbers — that's the other thing, and I'll ask you three times because I got stung on the back room. Two pieces off two different batches, hung side by side, and there's a shade line straight down the join you can see from the settee in daylight. Same colourway, same number on the label, different dye run. So: order the lot in one go, one batch, and go one piece over. The spare lives on top of the wardrobe until the meter man puts his elbow through it, and he will.

Lining paper crossways under anything thin, mind. New plaster or not. I'm not looking at the plasterer's cracks coming through by August.

And the embossed whites want their soak — how long does it say on the leaf? Right. Timed, then, not guessed, or they blister and I'll have you back. The vinyls in the kitchen want no soak at all and they'll slide off if you've sized it wrong, so size it right. That's the kitchen sorted in one sentence, which is more than I can say for the front room.

Put my figures in your table there. Eight six, perimeter's forty-four foot, one door, two windows, and yes you're reversing alternate lengths off the roll on the half-drops, because the waste off one length starts the next and I'm not paying twice for the same six inches.

Go on then — 4419 again. I know. I'm just looking. Order goes in Friday, one batch, plus one.