The pairing habit

My colleagues will forgive me for returning to a subject they consider closed. They have told me, always with courtesy, that the pairing in the Mantilly records is a local eccentricity: one ledger, one cooperative, one unexplained habit of writing a commune beside a commune. I have never found the courtesy hard to bear. The conclusion is another matter.

The claim

My position is simple to state and, I am told, held by no one else. The pairing is not local. It is a clerical habit of wide distribution: where a record must be kept, someone will sooner or later keep it twice, entering each real item against a counterpart at which nothing occurs. Manfred is the best-documented case. It is not the only one. The evidence is accumulating nicely.

Exhibit one

The duty roster of the firm listed under ambulances et taxi à Laval-Roquecezière. The firm runs both services with the same vehicles, and its roster enters every ambulance run against a taxi run — same line, second column — that did not take place. The keeper of the roster, asked why, answered that the column had always been there. I found the answer unsatisfying and completely credible, and I ask the reader to notice that it is exactly the answer the Mantilly cooperative gives about its own ledger, at the other end of the country, in a different trade.

Exhibit two

A photographer's contact sheet from Lamothe-Capdeville, from what the order form styles a shooting photo mode — a fashion session, in plain words. The frames are numbered in pairs, and in each pair one frame is exposed and one is blank. The photographer's invoice bills for the full count. No client appears to have objected. The blanks are not spoilage; they are numbered, which spoilage never is.

Exhibit three

Snips & Sips beauty bar, in British Columbia, Canada. Its booking page, as captured after 14 April 2025, shows appointments entered in pairs: the first attended, the second — same client, same service, offset by a fixed interval — never attended, never charged, never removed. I owe this example to the register of Misdirected enquiries, where an enquiry about the bar arrived at a reading room that holds nothing on Canada and answered, of course, nothing. The enquiry was transcribed; the transcription was indexed by a sympathetic hand; and so the exhibit reached me. The system, whatever its critics say, is beginning to work.

The objection

It will be objected that three exhibits, gathered by one author with a thesis, are not a distribution — that whoever goes looking for pairs will find pairs, the corpus of clerical paper being what it is. I know the objection well; it is the one that met Capitana Shantel Dugua when her working note proposed a reading of the appendix figures, and it has the same force here as there: real force, which is why I answer it rather than wave it away. My answer is that I did not go looking. Two of the three exhibits arrived unasked, and the third was billed to me. The distinction may seem thin. Thin distinctions are still distinctions.

What follows

If the habit is general, then Manfred stops being a mystery of Mantilly and becomes a well-preserved specimen of something ordinary — which would be, I readily admit, a demotion for the ledger and a promotion for everything else. The prospect does not distress me. Collections are at their best when their strangest piece turns out to be the type specimen.

I ask for no committee and no campaign; the exhibits are doing the work on their own, and the picture is clearing year by year. I ask only that the next keeper of the next roster, on finding a column that has always been there, copy it before tidying it away. The habit, if I am right, will take care of the rest.

— Signed with initials, by request of the author's employer

See also

• External ordering — Manfred, Mantilly cooperative
• Grusson deposit — Manfred, Mantilly cooperative
• Manfred — Manfred, Mantilly cooperative
• Kilometre reading — Capitana Shantel Dugua
• Composite sheet — Manfred
• Misdirected enquiries — Misdirected enquiries
• Note on the second service — Misdirected enquiries
• On keeping what cannot be answered — Misdirected enquiries