He’s not wrong. The warehouse is full of floor-to-ceiling, heavy-duty steel shelves, construction built to take timbers. The nearest aisle to us is not full of wood, though. Instead, every available niche is jammed with pallets laden with broadsheet-sized posters, stacked half a meter deep and strapped in place. I do some quick mental arithmetic and realize there has to be upwards of a hundred thousand public notices here. I really don’t want to risk any of the shelves falling on me.

While the pallets are tagged for easy identification, someone has taken the trouble to hang a copy of each poster by the side of the shelves that hold the stock. The design values are classical, and not in a good way. Two-color printing on plain white paper: Here is the par-liamentary portcullis-and-crown symbol, sitting atop a perspective-flattened summoning grid, menaced by cartoonish green tentacles to ram home the message—STAY IN THE CIRCLE. And there is a symbolic nuclear family (tall male toilet-door figure, shorter female toilet-door figure, two small mini-me’s) gathered under an Elder Sign—CULTIST DANGER: WATCH YOUR NEIGHBOURS FOR THIS SIGN. I wince at this latter. (The next cultist I meet who can tell an Elder Sign from Transport for London’s new logo will be the first. And don’t get me started on the occult symbol they used for the Olympics . . .)

I look down the aisle. Yes, there it is: PROTECT AND SURVIVE with added magic circle goodness. Tentacles replace mushroom clouds in the variant semiological design language of pants-wetting despair at imminent brain-eating catastrophe.

“Is that,” Pete says in an awe-muffled voice, pointing, “a box of LPs?”

I follow his aim. Yes, there is indeed some sort of ancient gramophone contraption sitting on one of the shelves, next to an open box containing black plastic disks about thirty centimeters in diameter. “You mean the things they used to use before compact discs?”

“Yes, Bob. Surely you must remember—”

Yes, I remember. (Just.) I walk towards the music player. There’s something wrong with these disks, they’re not quite the same as the ones my dad used to play. I get a bit closer before I can see properly. “They’re too thick.”

“That’s bakelite, Bob, modern disks are made of vinyl. Ahem.” Pete carefully extracts one of the disks from the velvet-lined box they’re racked in. “Wow! Look, these are 16s.”

“What’s that?”

“You play them at 16 revolutions per minute, not 33 or 45. Lousy high-frequency response but great for speech, and they run for twice as long. I bet these were specially mastered in the late sixties. They didn’t know how well magnetic tape would survive.”

“But what would they do with them?”