From Ray Martin
Maidstone, Kent
The joke about Microsoft and a lost helicopter pilot has a familiar ring
(Feedback, 11 January).
In 1938 I was in the civil service and there was a story circulating about
two very senior civil servants who were motoring in the remote countryside when
a thick fog descended and they became hopelessly lost. Through the murk they
spied someone they took to be a local inhabitant. Winding down the window they
inquired, “Can you please tell us where we are?” to which the local replied, “In
a motor-car in a fog”, and promptly disappeared into the gloom.
The two civil servants sat silently for a few minutes and then the more
senior one remarked, “That was the perfect example of an answer to a
Parliamentary question. It was short, absolutely correct and left the questioner
no wiser than he was before.”
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Tam Dalyell should appreciate that.
