Whither the businessman?

I saw a businessman whilst on my way to work this morning. I call him this as he was dressed pretty much in the traditional manner of a businessman - dark grey suit, he carried an umbrella and a briefcase, and he wore a bowler hat upon his head and glasses upon his nose. His age was in the late middle-aged bracket.

He had been walking along the river towards the city centre. As he passed under the city walls, he made a right turn heading away from town, towards the train station. This is unlikely to have been his destination however, since the route he had traversed would have not been an efficient manner to reach the trains. He would have wanted to take an earlier right turn along the edge of the Memorial Gardens (where the tramps hang out to drink cider and super-strength lager) in order to do that.

I would have liked to have followed him to find out exactly where he was going. Perhaps although he wasn't going to catch a train, maybe he was a senior manager on the railways, and was heading for the Train Office Building rather than the Train Station. But why then the bowler hat? Our trains may be something of an anachronism, but surely the staff do not all dress as if they work in the City of London in the 1930s? And in any case, the sun had got his own hat on (as they say) and so the man had no need of his own.

A similar argument could apply to any local office based job - so rule them all out. Perhaps instead, he was the supervisor of the small ice cream cart that served me a bottle of water at weekends. The one that was operated by children. Perhaps he has a chain of child-slave-labour operated ice cream stalls around York. And maybe even as far afield as Selby. I sometimes read about child-slave-labour in the Sunday supplements. Seems like a good idea to me, you can completely bypass the trade unions with their wacky ideas about “fair wages” and “clean working conditions”. But I don’t think that the cart was his destination either. Mainly because I had passed where it would have been a few minutes earlier and it was not there.

So if he wasn’t a local senior manager (on the railways or not) and he wasn’t a child-slave-labour magnate, then I could think of no other possible career he could be following. Except for one… There is another group of men who dress in suits and bowler hats. They are the men we call: Secret Agents! Not your Vin Diesel, ex-con makes good, style of agent, but your traditional British type. The type who sits on park benches and looks through eye holes cut in his open newspaper and who uses secret pass-phrases such as “My, the squirrels are lively today” when he meets his informants. The type personified by Avenger John Steed (from the original TV series, not the daft Sean Connery film with the Evil Teddy Bears).

Yes, clearly he was a secret agent, maybe it was even Steed himself! There must be something going down in York today. A big secret operation, maybe even greater than the time they caught the international orchid smuggling conspiracy that operated from the crypts beneath York Minster back in ’02. That headed up the local newspapers for months afterwards. I am glad I chose not to follow him - I might have ended up becoming embroiled in a deadly worldwide conspiracy, and that could have scuppered my plans for this evening.

I can only pray that the mere act of writing this has not jeopardised the agent and his mission. Good luck to you, Sir, the city could use more men of your calibre.