The Lawrence

The courier has just collected every Lawrence. Twelve weeks became twenty-three, and I'm grateful to every owner who waited. Tomorrow I fly to Italy, so the first jackets will land about the same time I do.

Every jacket is now whole. The buttons are stitched by hand, so there's no knot of thread behind them on the inside of the lapel. Quality checks start tomorrow.

Collected every jacket from Bolton today, my third five-hour round trip in two weeks. I'd started to wonder whether keyhole buttonholes were worth the anxiety. Next to an old prototype with standard buttonholes, they are.

Both London factories have turned me down. The buttonhole is the last thing done to a finished jacket, and nobody wants the risk. So I walked into the factory in Bolton today and said, "This is it guys, you're my last hope." Smooth, Mark. They have three Reece 101s, and they said yes.

I rang Meredith this week to check in, only to find he's just turned 85 and retired. He was going to cut every keyhole buttonhole on his Reece 101, and the technician who has serviced that machine for 40 years has retired too. I've got three leads, two in London and one in Bolton, and a bag of sample cuffs.

Last week went on laying out every pattern piece for all fifty jackets on the gabardine, at about two metres a jacket. A pair of XXL epaulettes is squeezed in among XL pieces, and two Small collars sit beside a Large back. Each jacket is 72 pieces, and the cutting has started.

The replacement lining has arrived and it's with Harvey Quilting. The tailors start next week.

I drove to Harvey Quilting this morning to film the lining going through the machine. Wool quilted straight onto woven cotton works its way through the weave, so it has to be sandwiched between two layers of membrane. Only one went in. That's 25 metres of lining gone and, realistically, four weeks added to delivery.

The printed lining comes from Poland and has never taken more than five days. This time it crossed Poland and the Netherlands in a day and reached Dartford that evening. And there it stayed. Twenty-one days later it's out of customs, but our slot with the quilters has gone.

I've caught up with eight Lawrence owners on Zoom about sizing, and two have switched sizes. There's cloth for fifty jackets and no more, so if a size is wrong I can't make another. Better to check twice.