(Comments screened. I will delete any comment giving the slightest hint as to which country is being talked about.)

The foreign ministry is a peculiar warren of corridors and staircases, basically because it is an eighteenth-century mansion now called upon to be the nerve centre of the modern state’s international activities. I had had a good late morning meeting with A, a diplomat a few years older than me, and he was bringing me as promised to my friend B’s office. Eventually A located the correct staircase to find B, and declared bemusedly that he had not ascended that particular flight of stairs in twenty years. But his instincts were good, and indeed at the top of the stairs we found B in her office.

Which is basically the changing room behind the minstrels’ gallery from which one could serenade the ballroom at the heart of the eighteenth-century mansion that has now become the foreign ministry.

But she has a computer and a desk.

I find this peculiar. But maybe that is just me.