FOR KING AND COUNTRY

"In Volgograd, the drains
are wider in winter."

Friday night, party time, out on the town, out on the razzle?

Nope. I'm a 36 year-old software engineer with a comfortable pair of slippers. I stayed in and watched a programme about spies. It turns out that in the 1950s and 60s, spies really did meet each other on park benches to swap secrets; they really did have one-word codenames, and they really did wear raincoats and trilbies.

I've always been fascinated by the world of MI6 and the furtive arena of global espionage. I used to know a guy who worked as a sort of encryption expert for a government agency - or so he said. He was fiendishly clever, a real Q: the type of chap who could complete chess puzzles in his head. Once, he taught me how to play five dimensional noughts and crosses (which I didn't understand - something to do with vectors I think) and he had a fascination with maps. We all suspected that he might have been working in secret intelligence when he refused to go into great detail about his work. Whenever someone asked him where his office was, he'd just smile a little, then dismissively reply with, "Oh, you know; in London," and then change the subject.

Then again, thinking it through, he was also the type of person who could have taken great delight in letting us believe he was a spy, citing the official secrets act as the perfect reason not to go into any details. Who knows - maybe he was really working at B&Q the whole time.

Carlos the Liberator used to work at B&Q. I think that might be where he learned his passion for arguing. His latest set of emails to me have all been about accountability - a tricky subject, given that half way through I realised we were talking about subtly different things. I think there's a difference between accountability and responsibility, but we'll leave that for another deeper time.

Espionage eh? Reported in a slightly less covert and definitely less classy fashion this week, was the story of the girl who got stuck in a drain. 16 year-old Ella Birchenough jumped into a storm drain to rescue her phone, which had slipped out of her hand and into the sewer.

The media were actually quite quick to portray her as rather stupid. One news channel ran an interview with an eyewitness who said,

"I just saw a girl in the road, obviously, and when I got a bit closer, I realised she was actually down in the drain? I don't think I'll ever see anything like that again - it was amazing."

Someone else commented on the fact that she'll find it hard to live this down. Another, on the national news, said that a girl that size ought to have realised that she wouldn't fit through a hole that was smaller than her waistline.

Actually, I think it's unfair. Reading around the story, I got the impression that she dropped her phone, felt stupid about it and decided to do something drastic to get it back. Single-handedly, she cranked open the drain cover, propped up the heavy iron grill and jumped in, feet-first. I think at that point she realised that she didn't have the strength in her arms to lift herself out - which is a very different thing to being wedged in! What's more, one article I read suggested that her mum, presumably from the safety of the curb, told her not to try in case she did herself more damage:

"I thought to myself, 'I'm not leaving this' and I jumped down to get it. I wasn't really even stuck, I just needed somebody to help lift me out but my mum got all panicky.

I quite like the attitude of 'I'm not leaving this' ... even if it wasn't the best idea. Far too many young people give up at the slightest sign of a difficult situation. To see someone brave enough to say, "Oi! I'm not having it and I'm going to do something about it!" is actually quite refreshing. In fact, I myself, wish I'd been a bit more like that twenty years ago. There is definitely something great about standing up against injustice and declaring that you're going to be part of the solution.

Maybe that was what motivated those young Oxbridge idealists to slip on a raincoat and a trilby and do their bit for King and Country. It certainly beats living a life out on the razzle.