Mma Makutsi shrugged. “Well, it would be far better if they started to deliver mail in this country rather than simply throwing it into a post box. It takes me at least fifteen minutes to walk to the box and get the letters. Every day. That’s over one hour every week spent in just picking up letters. That is a big waste of time.” She drew in her breath; she was warming to her theme. “At the Botswana Secretarial College they said that we should work out how much time it takes to perform small tasks and then multiply it by five to see how much of the week it takes. Then multiply by four to see what it takes over the whole month.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. “Sometimes I think of the time it takes to make tea and then to drink it. It’s four minutes to boil the water, and then there is all the business of putting the tea in the pot—”

The issue of tea breaks took them onto dangerous ground, and she was quickly interrupted by Mma Makutsi. “That is quite different, Mma,” she said. “I was talking about the mail. Why can’t they deliver it? They do that in other countries, you know. If your house has a number, they bring the letter to you.”

Mma Ramotswe thought about this for a moment. Mma Makutsi certainly had a point; Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors had a plot number, and provided the agency used this in its address, then the post office should be able to find them. But not everybody was in that position. Out in the villages, or even in some parts of Gaborone, things became higgledy-piggledy as people built their houses wherever they pleased. How would the post office deal with that? She raised this difficulty with Mma Makutsi, who listened attentively but then shook her head in disagreement.

“All they have to do is to get somebody who knows the district,” she said. “That would be easy enough, especially in the villages. Everybody knows who’s who in the villages. You don’t need a plot number there.” She paused. “And there’s another thing—if you forgot somebody’s name, all you would need to do would be to write a description of what they look like on the envelope. That would do.”

Mma Ramotswe glanced up at the ceiling. One of the plaster-boards was discoloured at the edges, where rain had made its way in during the previous rainy season, and would have to be replaced. Mma Makutsi was right about villages, even the bigger ones, like Mochudi, where Mma Ramotswe had been born. Those places were still intimate enough for a rough description to suffice. If somebody had written a letter addressed to “That man who wears the hat, the one who was a miner and knows a lot about cattle, Mochudi, Botswana,” it would undoubtedly have been correctly delivered to her father.