In my life I have worked in many varied jobs. During a short period in the nineteen eighties I worked for the Royal Mail in London as a postman. The office I worked in was called E.C.D.O ( Eastern Central District Office ) located in Newgate Street adjacent to Saint Paul's Cathedral. It had a compliment of four thousand staff and dealt with mail posted in and received by The City of London. This included The Stock Exchange, Bank of England, Hatton Gardens (diamond merchants) and all the other financial institutions one would expect to find in a great metropolis.The building we worked in was extraordinary as it contained a church a mosque, two restaurants, two bars and assorted playgrounds. The work area itself extended from an underground railway system independent of London Transport through six or seven storeys that was the hub of all manner of sorting activities; letters, parcels and packets were processed at a rate of seven million a week on average rising to nineteen million at Christmas. It was often touted that we ran the best postal system in the world - an assertion that had the majority of postal workers laughing like drains. However, the system did work because we were all prepared to help each other so that the Royal Mail was delivered on time.In order to ensure that we were not impeded in our efforts, by some unkind fellows who would often take the time and effort to send letter bombs through our office, security was of a ' high' priority. I myself was instructed to remove a suspect package and take it to a place where it would be safe until the bomb squad arrived. I imagined some high tech isolation unit so you will appreciate my surprise when I and said suspect package had to travel in an elevator up two floors only to find a bucket of water and a bucket of sand in the middle of a large hall. This journey became a fairly regular affair but the office remained open and the sorting unaffected. This was the normal state of affairs until the 'night of the marzipan attack'.To understand how marzipan could disrupt the mail its best to have a picture of the building I worked in in your mind. Imagine, if you will, a large Victorian edifice that had platforms at the east and west sides of the building. These were used to receive and dispose of sack loads of mail brought to and taken away from us by vans. Connecting these two platforms was a conveyor belt that ran through the center of the building. Mail brought to us which was intended for sorting at our office would be taken from the vans and deposited down a chute marked ECDO. The rest would be deposited down a chute that led directly to the conveyor belt. This would take it to the platform at other side of the building where it would be sorted into vans dependent on which district it was headed for. This was an unremarkable process that took place hundreds of times a day. However on a particularly sultry summers night, a combination of heat, gravity, fans and plain bad judgment led to the evacuation of everyone in the building.You see! At around three thirty in the morning the temperature in the main sorting area had rising to stifling levels; body and machinery heat coupled with the outside atmosphere meant that the fans which were always running to reduce the paper dust in the building and cool us were becoming ineffective. So someone had the sensible idea of wedging open the doors on the east and west platforms to create a draught. It helped a great deal until that fateful delivery of a gallon of concentrated marzipan extract. It was delivered to us in a standard post bag so we couldnt see exactly what we were dealing with. It was heavy and was marked for another office and as such was duly dropped onto the conveyor belt some ten feet below the platform. There was a sharp crack as the glass container holding the stuff broke. But off it went through the building to the opposing platform where it hit the ground and spilled its contents.During its short but eventful journey through the sorting area some of the staff started to cough unaccountably and their eyes started to stream. The air was filled with marzipan flavour and many commented that Christmas seemed to have come early. However, the best was yet to come. One of the managers in charge of the platform where the concentrate was now oozing decided that the best course of action would be to turn a hose on it and wash it away. In his defence it must be said that he had no idea that he was dealing with anything other than a wet smelly substance that should be washed away. The result of his actions meant we then had about 80 gallons of concentrated marzipan extract giving of fumes that took full advantage of the draught system created to alleviate our discomfort. It would be hard to say that the effect on the personnel was akin to a mustard gas attack but it wasnt far off. Soon people were making for every available exit. As luck would have it Saint Bartholomews hospital was located further down Newgate Street and a few traipsed there in the hope of succour. Others who had developed a furious thirst in the marzipan cloud decided the best course of action was to wander down to Smithfield Market. The famous London meat emporium worked through the night just like we did and because of this the local pubs opened to cater for the workers hours accordingly. By seven oclock some four hours after the onset of the marzipan attack it was difficult to discern which postal workers were suffering from what. It was generally agreed however that two symptoms brought on by an overflow of marzipan extract was slurred speech and an unsteady gait.I believe the report into the incident was lost.