Chapter 45

Picking up my newspaper, and a 4-pint carton of whole milk—I can’t stand the semi or-fully-messed-about-with kind—I went up to the counter and asked Mrs Hussein for my magazine. Then, following the usual polite enquiries about the health of her extended family, the expected warm weather, and the disgraceful amount of chewing gum on the pavements, I slowly made my way back along my street of Victorian terraced houses while leafing through my magazine. I was engrossed in an article onProject Ultra, the top secret code-breaking experiment that the allies had set up during the Second World War to intercept and decode the Nazi’s military signals, when a beautifully soft Irish voice brought me back to the present.

“Please be careful, sir.”

“Huh?” I looked up just in time to save myself from falling into a hole in the pavement caused by the absence of a manhole cover, or whatever the now politically correct term for such things were. Somehow ‘person-hole cover’ didn’t well…cover it.