You may wonder what happens to the wasted time after it has all been cleaned up. Never fear, the time-sweepers are ardent recyclers. It is collected, packed into large containers, moved to Liverpool docks, loaded onto a ship, and taken to India. There, in a dusty industrial estate somewhere near Bombay, it is cleaned, sorted, and graded. The most toxic and poisoned time – the residues of failed peace negotiations, wrongful imprisonments and truly poisonous marriages, is skimmed off and buried in a tank underneath a disused army base. There, it will take two or three centuries to decay, and become harmless again.
The rest of the time – made up of stuff such as dull meetings, missed appointments, delayed buses and bad nights at the theatre, is cleaned and put back onto a ship, where it is taken to the Guangzhou industrial export processing zone. Here it is compressed and stored, awaiting redistribution. Around twenty percent goes direct to the factories of the export processing zone, which has the world's highest productivity rate. A quarter is bought in hard dollars by the Chinese government. Ten percent of the most concentrated stuff is sold to a cryogenics laboratory in California. Another twenty or so percent is discreetly sold to a variety of rich private clients, mostly old, rich men who have married beautiful young women