A man called up MI5. “Hello. I hear you record phone conversations. Is that correct?”
The agent said: “Oh no, sir. We don’t do that.” The man explained he was just talking to his wife and she gave him a list of things to get while shopping, but he’d forgotten them. “She must be out of phone coverage now, so I thought I would check with you rather than let her know I forgot.”
The spook replied: “We don’t listen to civilian conversations. However, you shouldn’t go home without these dozen eggs, the tomatoes or the fabric conditioner.”
We’re all jittery about security now. MI5 and secret codes and encryption is always in the news. Countries are allegedly hacking and tapping each other all the time.
New MI5 chief Ken McCallum, from Broomhill in Glasgow, wants to tighten up laws for new online threats. They are hopelessly out of date, he reckons. Go to it, Kenny.
Cracking codes saves lives
Secret codes are part of history. Julius Caesar sent his military messages in code. Hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt were secret codes written in a defunct language, until Napoleon’s troops discovered the Rosetta Stone and British and French scholars later discovered the key to the old squiggles.
Hitler, too, used a clever Enigma machine to encode important messages, until Alan Turing and his brilliant colleagues at Bletchley Park, including some from here on Lewis, cracked the code. That probably saved millions of lives.
History. Don’t remind me about second year history. I messed up. I swotted up beforehand, and secretly wrote the answers on my hands about Napoleon and King James I, which I thought would come up.
Then I got into a scrap and my hands became unreadably filthy. Mud, blood, guts… I think I got an F. For frightful, probably.
Secret codes are handy in marriages, too. After 25 years of marriage, Mrs X recently asked me to describe her. I gave her that hot, sweaty look like when I get heartburn, and I whispered: “ABCDEFGHIJK.”
Shocked, she asked what I meant. I said: “Adorable, beautiful, cute, delightful, elegant, fashionable, gorgeous and hot.”
Beaming broadly, she asked: “And what about IJK?” I replied: “I’m just kidding.”
Dyscalculia jumbles up numbers in your head
A wifi password is a secret code. Take care before sharing. Here’s a trick to protect yours without telling lies. Set it to 2444666668888888. So, when someone asks for it, tell them quite truthfully that it’s 12 34 56 78. They won’t bother decoding that.
Mrs X has problems decoding numbers. Seriously, I’m not joking. She suffers from dyscalculia.
She’s been told that’s why she finds it hard to remember image numbers when she is editing her photos. Now, I might be wrong here, but I thought dyscalculia was something that happened to our sheep. Oh wait. No, that was dystocia.
That is a difficult birth, isn’t it? No, that was not what was up with Mrs X last week. Well, I don’t think so anyway. She would have said something.
Oh heck, have I missed something else that’s fairly important going on in this house? I’d better go and ask her. Talk amongst yourselves.
I’m back. No babies up there. She says dyscalculia is often described as number blindness – like dyslexia, but numbers instead of letters. She gets numbers jumbled up in her head. She can remember numbers but not the order they should be in.
Ha ha, her head’s like yon Morecambe and Wise sketch with André Preview, as they called him. Eric defended his own piano playing, saying: “I am playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.”
My tap tapped out
I’d better shush. MI5 might have tapped our line. Actually, we got tapped last week. The mixer tap on the bathroom basin gave up the ghost.
Just in case Boris is wrong and the pandemic is not over yet, I’ve been washing my hands every hour for the last few days
I blame all the handwashing precautions for Covid-19. The tap had enough. Thankfully, rescue was at hand and Alasdair from AD Macdonald, professional plumbing consultants to discerning gentry, came to the rescue with a big spanner. New tap is great. Thanks, Alasdair.
You know how it is when you get new equipment – whether it is a toy, a tool or a tap in the bog. You just use it all the time – because it is new.
So, just in case Boris is wrong and the pandemic is not over yet, I’ve been washing my hands every hour for the last few days. In fact, I’ve been washing my hands so much, I think I have just found the answers to my second year history exam.
Iain Maciver is a former broadcaster and news reporter from the Outer Hebrides
