But be that as it may, I am jointly assigned as a humble junior manager in External Assets and as private secretary to DSS Angleton. And as a junior manager it is my fate to sit in on the committees my bosses can’t be arsed attending. Consequently I don’t have time to investigate our organizational case of macular degeneration right now because I’m up to my eyeballs in meetings. I don’t even get to goof off from the boardroom antics—I have to summarize for them. It’s like being forced to test a hideous new role-playing game in which you play at being gray-suited office minions trapped in a hellish world of paper-shuffling and boardroom presentations (mediated by frequent dice rolls) without meaning or magic. And because of the fucking DRESDEN RICE committee other people are laughing at me! Speaking as the former laugh-a-minute guy around here, I’ve got to say that it stings.

So, while I’m busy spending up to six hours in committees every day—yes, the beatings will continue until morale improves—let me give you a whistle-stop tour of the highlights of what’s been going on in the New Annex since last month, in the shape of a clichéd movie montage.

• • •

KNOCK KNOCK.

Pete is not expecting anyone to come knocking on his office door. Or rather, the door of the temporarily vacant office to which he has been given a key and in which he has had installed a PC, a chair, a desk, and a bookshelf full of Aramaic concordances. When it comes, Pete is holed up inside, in jeans and a polo shirt, swearing mildly at a web design application as he hunts for typos and grammatical infelicities in the copy he has spent the past weeks laboriously updating from the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY brochure.

Pete looks up. “Come in?” he calls.

The door opens. It’s Andy, escorting a gawky late-teenage stranger on the usual office disorientation tour, wherein they meet loads of strangers and instantly forget their names, merely retaining a vague impression of organizational complexity gone to seed. Intern, Pete thinks instantly, then with a flash of mortification: Am I going native already? He’s been here for five weeks; it feels like forever and he’s itching to get back to his parish. However the bishop has clearly been nobbled, for he’s sent a circuit priest to pick up the ropes without any complaints or queries; this is England, where the Church is notionally still part of the state, and there’s probably an Office of Occult Coordination tucked away in Canterbury to handle embarrassments like this. At least Sandy is being understanding, and HR are fine with him taking time off work to accompany her to the antenatal clinic.