I joined the inspection service at nineteen and left it last spring. In that time I visited perhaps eleven thousand premises. I wrote perhaps eleven thousand reports. I was good at the work and I believed in it, and I want to explain what I now think it was for.

We were told we measured supply. We recorded stock levels, turnover, wastage. The forms had boxes for all of it.

But the forms also had boxes for who was present, how often the same names appeared, and which premises were visited by which blobs and at what hour. Those boxes were not optional. If you left them blank the report came back.

The part I did not want to see

For most of my career I assumed the identity fields were administrative. Housekeeping. You need to know who runs a shop to write to them.

Then in my last year I asked, out of ordinary curiosity, what happened to the reports after they left my hands. I was told they were aggregated. I asked by whom. I was told that was not an inspection matter.

I asked three more times, in writing. I received the same sentence each time, which is how I knew it was not being written by anybody.

I do not think there is a conspiracy. I think somebody, decades ago, added two fields to a form because they were cheap to add, and nobody has ever had a reason to remove them, and now there is a record of the movements of every trading blob in the country going back thirty years, and it exists because it was easier to collect than to not collect.

That is the part I want you to understand. Nobody decided this. It accumulated.