As more and more goods tumble through letterboxes in brown cardboard parcels, the idea of a high street crisis is now common political currency, blurring into a growing obsession among politicians with the fate of English towns, many of which seemed to express their collective fears about the future by voting for Brexit.
"I sat down with a pile of old cardboard, some parcel tape, a pair of scissors and plenty of hot tea," he writes.
While he was well enough the couple went sailing together, and when he was too weak for that he painted obsessively, on cardboard and brown parcel paper, an old bait box, and pieces of china.
"It's made out of cardboard, probably from a parcel," he said.
She has protected it with a simple parcel of corrugated cardboard and, as she looks around at the rolls of bubble wrap and the heaps of padded envelopes, a thought comes to her suddenly: why was this "courier" carrying the book wrapped only in brown paper?
They arrived in the post, in an innocuous cardboard box, "just commodities, being delivered like any other parcel".
At the end of each day, aisles are blocked with cardboard boxes and the markets fill with the sound of ripping parcel tape, as packages are sealed and despatched into fleets of vans waiting outside.
The institution in charge of reconstruction located monuments in some of the empty parcels and built symbolic buildings, such as the Cardboard Cathedral (also called the transitional cathedral) and founded the Quake City museum.
Protesters lined the track and, at Hawick, loaded on a cardboard coffin addressed to the transport minister (which was accepted as a goods parcel) before the train reached Newcastleton, where villagers stood across the line and blocked its passage.
