2008-09-29

September 29th, 2008 10:40pm

After the second world war, new recruits to MI5 were trained by a martinet who took justified pride in his invisibility. When the martinet died, his followers decided to attend his funeral–secretly, of course. One of them told me how their cars joined the procession at a distance–not easy because slow vehicles, like slow people, are hard to follow discreetly. Sometimes they had to overtake, at others drop back or take a parallel road. They performed these manoeuvres with a professionalism they were sure he’d have been proud of. But they lost the cortege, missing the funeral entirely and leaving–they imagined–the old boy raging in his coffin.