The Ledger.

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.

Each jacket takes five fabrics, two interfacings, two sizes of Corozo button and a whole raft of other bits. The gabardine is already here, and the wool, the rib, the buttons and the thread were ordered last week. Everything comes to me first so I can go through it with a fine-tooth comb before it goes anywhere near the tailors.

At 9.24 this evening, order number 50 came in. That's 34 hours, 24 minutes and 16 seconds after early access opened, and four years after I started. I don't quite know what to say.

The Lawrence goes on sale on Saturday 29 April at 11am. There's enough gabardine for fifty jackets, so there will be fifty. Five hundred laser-etched Corozo buttons arrived from a local button maker in under three weeks.

Collected the final sample from Agnes in Leicester today. Seven prototypes, four years after the first sketch. It's ready.