A Missive from the Secret Service.

I was treated to a little mystery tonight. I received a comment on my last post which, you might recall, made mention of the author John le Carré, and it purported to come from MI6.

(MI6 is one of the two arms of British Intelligence, the other being MI5. MI6 is the one which sends agents overseas to drive fast cars and collect knicker elastic from as many exotic women as possible. James Bond is its most celebrated alumnus. MI5 employs spies in this country to watch out for persons of foreign extraction who might be engaged in dubious behaviour, such as waylaying the outpourings of the Prime Minister’s private toilet and examining them for anything which might be of value in the event of WWIII breaking out. Or so I’ve heard. Of course, this information might just be part of a fiendish plot to confuse the Chinese. Who can tell?)

But back to the mystery…

The first mystery is the question of why the exalted people at MI6 would be interested in the private/societal/political/philosophical/spiritual musings of a little person like me – born and raised on the wrong side of the tracks and now subsisting in the dark and lonely wasteland beyond them. And even my dark and lonely wasteland is on the wrong side of the fence, given the explanation provided above. But it did contain much detailed information regarding le Carré’s life and associates during his employment with the said service in the 50s and 60s, so who can tell?

The second mystery concerns the means by which the comment was conveyed to me. It appeared, as usual, in my Gmail account. It also appeared, as is also usual, in the ‘Comments’ section of my blog’s dashboard. But it didn’t appear on the blog itself. That still shows ‘no comments’, and that’s most unusual.

I’m inclined to suspect that the comment didn’t really come from MI6. It seems a bit far-fetched even for my near-limitless imagination, and the detailed information is probably in any number of reference works. So why didn’t it appear on the blog? And what is the real identity of some anonymous person communicating with me using the handle ‘MI6’?