YOU think he’s lagging behind the rest of you, but is your useless mate Martin actually a covert MI6 agent? Here are six suspicious signs:
An allegedly boring job
Martin claims to work ‘in software’ and, when prompted, gives a job description so dull that you instantly forget it and never bother to ask again. This is a dead giveaway that he is actually a top security clearance man of mystery known at the highest levels of British intelligence as ‘The Ghost’.
Never replies to the group WhatsApp
You think Martin never responds because all he does outside of ‘software’ is watch repeats of Family Guy and has nothing interesting to contribute. However, the truth is he spends most of his time flying around the world in unmarked government jets and has no time for the trivialities of the ‘Uni Ladz’ group chat.
Never moans about work
On a night out the rest of you bitch and whine about your commute, your boss and your colleagues. Martin claims he does not mind his daily drive to a business park in Maidstone, and gets on quite well with his boss, but that’s because his actual trip to work this week involved being dropped into hostile territory in the Sudan under the cover of nightfall, and his line manager is Q.
Never buys a round
You once saw Martin’s bank statement and were staggered by the balance in his current account. You thought it was because his sole expenditure outside of the necessities was on paint for his Warhammer figurines, but actually he’s paid more in a day than you earn in a year. Martin never buys a round but it’s not because he’s tight, he just doesn’t want to break his carefully constructed cover as a parsimonious little prick.
Occasional conference somewhere dull
The bi-annual conference in Bradford is a front: a hidden compartment in Martin’s sensible wheeled laptop bag reveals an array of Japanese fighting knives which he’s taking with him to infiltrate a crypto-terrorists’ lair in Svalbard. Martin’s receipts for fried breakfasts at the Premier Inn on the A64 ring road are an ingenious façade provided by the army of Oxbridge graduates who maintain his fake identity from a bunker under Whitehall.
Apparent lack of girlfriend
While all his mates have progressively got girlfriends, got married and had children, Martin has stayed in his rented flat, with no long-term relationship other than his steadfast devotion to Miss Millie’s fried chicken. This is an elaborate front to mask Martin’s frequent dangerous trysts in exotic locations with glamorous Russian spies and Iranian femme fatales in sequinned gowns.
