Meanwhile, Vixens Basketball Team, as they chose to call themselves, ventured out to play their first game. They got thrashed. They wouldn’t bend until they were sure they weren’t presenting unflattering angles to anyone; they wouldn’t jump until they were confident that their hair was properly in place; they apologised to any opponents they happened to bump into. Nails needed to be inspected after receiving a pass, before the ball could be passed on. Laura threw their only goal for the game, late in the second half, and they flocked around her so jubilantly that no one saw any reason to continue after that. I ordered them to stay on the court until time ran out
    “We’re beaten,” Eva muttered at me. “Why don’t we just tell them they’ve won and go home.”
    “Because the game isn’t over,” I screeched.
    “Of course it is. They’re miles in front,” Sammy Quick pointed out logically. ”Is it necessary to humiliate us as well?”
    “You have to play out time,” I protested bitterly. “It’s the rules.”
    “You mean, we aren’t allowed to give up if we want to? What a silly rule.”
    So they stood in a grumpy huddle in the middle of the court and let their opponents run up a huge score unopposed.
    I consoled myself with the fact that I had not had the chance to teach them how to shoot goals yet—the whole training session had been taken up with teaching them to throw and catch. And that this debacle would surely mean the end of the matter. It was getting pretty embarrassing, after all.
    But it was not. Next Tuesday night, they were back again, keen as mustard. I knew then that I would never understand women.

He sat and thought about minister level like he’d been asked to write the eleventh commandment.
I nudged his reverie. “But I don’t even have a file number on it. You’ve got it.”
“Precisely, old boy. Now we’re getting down to tin tacks. Now if I were a stranger, you’d have funds to buy the dossier, wouldn’t you?” He rushed on without pausing. “You have more leeway in these things than I do, or we have, I should say. Well, for a fair sum, it’s all yours.” He sat back but he didn’t relax.
At first I had trouble understanding him, so I played it back at half speed.
“You mean,” I said, “that my department should buy this file from your department?”
    Len Deighton offered a spy thriller with a difference—it was believable. The Ipcress File has an unheroic, sarcastic hero who never names himself. The work is very bureaucratic, done in scungy backroom offices where grumpy fat secretaries make rotten tea and everyone is furiously empire-building. That emerges as the theme, the enemy agents of both sides are merely pawns in a struggle for the top jobs in Whitehall, fought here between military and civilian intelligence services. Our hero is seconded from the former to expose corruption in the latter. Very lively and amusing—it was promising stuff and the film they made from it equally so.
    In the same way that the Rolling Stones were the Beatles gone grubby, this was James Bond done drab. The movie, with Michael Caine playing the hero now christened Harry Palmer, was blessed by Nigel Green and Guy Doleman as the two warring heads of department. And Sue Lloyd, a television guest star regular gone feral in the movies. It was all so wonderfully grotty.