Status Updates From A Landing on the Sun

I have found what I was looking for, and getting what one wants is a notoriously fallible source of happiness. As these two moulting lovebirds are doubtless about to discover. I am tempted to put the tapes back in the biscuit tin and ask for a transfer, like Mrs Padmore.

I begin to feel that this woman is making fools of us all. It is right that our procedures should be subject to challenge and change, but her idea of turning a Government Advisory Unit into some kind of Oxford tutorial is an absurd perversion of everything that has been so slowly and painstakingly developed over the years.

‘What do you understand by the phrase quality of life?' I asked him. He said he thought it was something to do with washing-machines, which for a start I found deeply puzzling.

Enjoying this cleverly comic exploration of the mind of a British civil servant, an advanced species of bureaucrat.

It doesn't hurt that a key event of the early part of the book takes place in one of the odd London alleyways I walked through on my way to work for 18 years, and where, as part of our Green program, the Chairman, Company Secretary and I planted a tree, now, sadly, possibly mysteriously, gone.