{"id":729,"date":"2007-11-26T15:50:34","date_gmt":"2007-11-26T14:50:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=729"},"modified":"2007-11-26T15:50:34","modified_gmt":"2007-11-26T14:50:34","slug":"would-you-like-to-be-a-secret-agent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=729","title":{"rendered":"Would you like to be a secret agent?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/media\/2007\/nov\/26\/bbc.radio\">reported<\/a> that the Secret Intelligence Service (that&#8217;s MI6 to you and me) is mounting a recruitment drive this week to attract budding James Bonds, though without the licence to kill. Like its sister agency, the domestic Security Service (or MI5), it wants to &#8220;broaden its staff base&#8221; to &#8220;better reflect the ethnicity of the community we serve&#8221;.<br \/>\nNow I like to ask foreigners where they come from and try to respond by using a few words of greeting in their language. I do this in taxi cabs, restaurants, shops and the like.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m often asked how I know the language (of course, I don&#8217;t &#8211; I&#8217;ve just memorised a few greetings from my travels). Sometimes, if I&#8217;m feeling mischievous, I say that I used to be a spy and had to know a lot of languages because I never knew the destination of my next mission.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s clear from the responses that some people think this is a likely explanation &#8211; but I think that I&#8217;m too old now to be a spy (I&#8217;ve seen &#8220;Casino Royale&#8221; and I can&#8217;t run like that). However, if you&#8217;d like to consider joining MI5 or MI6, the BBC web site has <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/magazine\/7112814.stm\"> interviews<\/a> with some young operatives to give you an idea of what is wanted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is reported that the Secret Intelligence Service (that&#8217;s MI6 to you and me) is mounting a recruitment drive this week to attract budding James Bonds, though without the licence to kill. Like its sister agency, the domestic Security Service (or MI5), it wants to &#8220;broaden its staff base&#8221; to &#8220;better reflect the ethnicity of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}