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including but not limited to new-build Crown estate properties in order to write down the balance sheet deficit left by the games.
    “Thank you, Mr. Bevan, for that fascinating peek inside the invaluable work of the DCMS. Ah, and now you, Mr., ah, Howard, is it?”
    I blink back to the here and now, open my mouth, and freeze.
    What I was about to say was something like this: “Hi, I’m Bob Howard. I’m a computational demonologist and senior field agent working for an organization you don’t know exists. My job involves a wide range of tasks, including: writing specifications for structured cabling runs in departmental offices; diving through holes in spacetime that lead to dead worlds and fighting off the things with too many tentacles and mouths that I find there; liaising with procurement officers to draft the functional requirements for our new classified document processing architecture; exorcising haunted jet fighters; ensuring departmental compliance with service backup policy; engaging in gunfights with the inbred cannibal worshippers of undead alien gods; and sitting in committee meetings.”
    All of which is entirely true, and utterly, impossibly inadmissible: if I actually said it smoke would come out of my ears and my hair would catch fire long before I died, thanks to the oath of office I have sworn and the geas under which Crown authority is vested in me.
    “Mr. Howard?” I snap into focus. Dr. Tring is peering at me, an expression of faint concern on his face.
    “Sorry, must be something I ate.” Quick, pull yourself together, Bob! “The name’s Howard, Bob Howard. I work in IT security for, uh, the Highways Agency, in Leeds. My job involves a wide range of tasks, including: writing specifications for structured cabling runs in departmental offices; liaising with procurement officers to draft the functional requirements for our new automatic numberplate recognition-based road pricing scheme’s penalty ticket management system; ensuring departmental compliance with service backup policy; and sitting in committee meetings.”
    I blink. They’re all staring at me as if I’ve grown a second head, or coughed to being a senior field agent in a highly classified security organization.
    “That’s the system for handing out automatic fines to people who exceed the speed limit between cameras anywhere on the road network, isn’t it?” Debbie from DFID chirps, bright and menacing.
    “Um, yes?” Living as we do in central London, inside the Congestion Charge Zone, Mo and I don’t own a car.
    “My mum got one of them,” observes Andrew from the Olympics. “She was driving my dad to the A&E unit, he swore blind ’e’d just got indigestion, but ’e’d already ’ad one heart attack—” The dropped aitches are coming out; the mob of angry peasants with the pitchforks and torches will be along in a moment.
    “ I think they’re stupid, too,” I say, perhaps a trifle too desperately; Dr. Tring is focusing on me with the expressionless gaze of a zombie assassin— don’t think about those things, you’re in public . “But it’s part of the integrated transport safety policy.” I hunch my back and roll my eyes as disarmingly as any semi-professional Igor to the Transport Secretary’s Frankenstein, but they’re not buying it. “Speed kills,” I squeak. From the way they stare at me, you’d think I’d confessed to eating babies.
    “That’s enough ,” says Dr. Tring, finally condescending to drag the seminar back on course. “Ah, Ms. Steele, if you don’t mind telling us a little about your specialty, which would be managing an audit team for HMRC…?”
    And Ms. Steele—thin-faced and serious as sudden death—launches straight into a series of adventures in carousel duty evasion and international reverse double-taxation law, during which I retreat into vindictive fantasies about setting my classmates’ cars on fire.
    FOUR HOURS OF SOUL-DESTROYINGLY BANAL TEDIUM—VAPID nostrums about