The ambassador from Azania to Ireland pressed his intercom. "Come in here, if you please," he said to his secretary. "It is time that I composed my first dispatch to the Foreign Minister." Kevin Myers on the complicated world of international diplomacy
His secretary scurried in with a bowed head. "How shall I address this letter, sire? 'To My Most Beloved Cousin'; or to 'Your Celestial Highness, Tiger of the Snows of Mount Ararat'; or 'Dear Foreign Minister'?"
"The last," sniffed the ambassador. "I think an element of austere formality is thoroughly justified after his decision to send me here. Are you ready? Good."
He paused to gaze out of the window, at the towering cloud banks that were queueing to unleash their contents on the Irish capital.
"It is with great pleasure," he dictated, "that I make my first report to your ministry. I beg your indulgence for the delay. I felt that I could not have done justice to the duties with which I have had the inestimable pleasure of being encumbered if I had hastened into my task without sufficient preparation. However, I feel the time is right for me to make my inaugural submission to you, now that winter is coming to an end."
The secretary cleared his throat and looked up from his dictation. "I beg your pardon, Oh Serene One."
The ambassador shot him a withering glance. "Kindly do not interrupt when I am dictating. If you have any tiny observations, you might reserve them for when I have finished. Now. Where were we?"
"'Winter is coming to an end. . .' But I am afraid I must tell you that this is not winter."
"Particularly severe spring"
The ambassador removed his spectacles and blinked sternly at the secretary. After a moment's reflection, he nodded, and said, "Very well. Conclude the final sentence with the words, 'now that a particularly severe spring is coming to an end.'"
The secretary cleared his throat again. It was an uncomfortable sound, as well it might be, for the secretary was acutely aware that when, in a previous regime, the ambassador had been Minister for Justice, he had dealt with the issue of beggars by the simple expedient of personally garrotting several hundred of them.
"Yes?" asked the ambassador impatiently, a look of nostalgie de garrotte flickering in his eye. "What is it now?"
The secretary hurriedly averted his gaze. "I fear that it was not spring either, oh Unvanquished Conqueror of the Main."
The ambassador rubbed his spectacles furiously. "Well, it can hardly have been autumn, with still worse to come. Worse is not possible. Does this peculiar island have a particular season unknown to us, for which we have no name in our language? If that is the case, it would explain a great deal."
The secretary cringed, and remained hunched in the chair, gazing at his notebook. "No, sire, there is no such season. This is summer, sire. This is how summer behaves here."
Face in hands
The silence which followed could have been cut into squares and packaged. The secretary trembled. He glanced from beneath his lowered eyebrows towards the ambassador, who was resting his face in his hands, and sobbing.
After a while, the ambassador mopped his tears up with a large linen handkerchief. "This explains it," he wondered aloud. "All those people buying barbecues and the shops selling charcoal, and I kept on wondering why supermarkets in the middle of winter were allocating entire sections to Ambre Solaire."
The secretary's pen was dancing across his notepad. "If you might excuse me, oh Lion of the Desert, how do you spell the final two words?"
"Dolt! Imbecile! Cretin! Spawn of a homosexual donkey! Those were interpolations, mere inner thoughts. The Minister would hardly be interested in the Irish appetite for barbecues in the rain, if that's actually what they do. Is that what they do, Ali?"
The secretary bowed his head miserably. "I don't know, Divine Terror of the Seven Seas. I have endeavoured not to socialise with the natives, lest I be invited to join one of their unspeakable summer rites and die of exposure."
"Let me see now, and correct me if I'm wrong, this being the general rule alike in Tibet, Peru and even Norway," declared the ambassador, a nervous tic developing in one eye. "The weather here, it gets worse in winter, yes?" The secretary nodded a melancholy affirmative, and repressed a sob.
"How is that possible?" whispered the ambassador incredulously. Outside, an icy Niagara was thundering against his window.
Penalty for amabassadors
"What is the penalty ambassadors must pay if they return home without authorisation, Ali?"
"The miscreant is made to eat cactus and his bowels are crammed with thornbush. He is meticulously flayed, then marinaded in lemon juice and salted, before being grilled until he forms nice crunchy crackling. He is then fed, still alive, to hyenas."
"Is that all? In that case, pack my bags. I'm going home."
"You mean 'we', Sir. First secretaries get off lightly. We are merely fed to jackals."
And arm in arm, whistling a carefree Bedouin barcarole, they sauntered off to their certain and excruciating doom, leaving far, far worse behind them.