Parcel Room — Six Boxes, No Labels

Right — put that down a second and look. Forty-one boxes came back from the depot at ten to nine with the address labels off them. Water got into the van, the labels are gum and paper, the labels are gone. Thirty-five I've done off size and shape alone. These six are all the same size. These six are the problem.

The despatch book is pinned up there. It's in pencil, because Ramanujam writes in pencil, in a room with a roof that leaks straight over his desk, and I have been asking for a proper ledger pen since February. It's still readable. Two corrections are circled and you have to believe both of them.

Balance is on the left. Hook a box on, it swings, it settles, you read grams — gross grams. Scissors will open a box and show you a colour and a metreage and nothing else; it will not show you a name, and the franking is printed on the flap you're cutting through, so you lose that. You get three cuts, because I have three rolls of tape.

Don't cut it yet. Weigh it first. Once you've cut it you've told me one thing, and the balance would have told you two.

Slip a name on a box, take the stamp, hit it. Get it wrong and it prints in red and it stays there. Van's at eleven.