It started at a bus stop just yesterday.

“Have you seen the Cirencester bus?”

No, I replied, but I was not looking for it. Cirencester is some miles from where we were both sitting on a handy bench opposite the Ivy: the posh restaurant at the top of Cheltenham. I would not have expected a bus to Cirencester to come this direction, as it would be going in the opposite direction, but my newfound bench-sharer assured me it did. It seems that it does a round tour of Cheltenham before setting of in the right direction.

To say he was unremarkable might be a little unkind; I’m not that remarkable myself. He was dressed in Englishmen’s shorts, sturdy but functional in grey, wore round, fine-rimmed glasses, and did he have a hat? I think so; might have been a light trilby. I’d have said he was in his 70s, fit-looking and slightly built.

“I’ll look at the board”, he said almost to himself, the board being an electronic gizmo that tells more lies than truth about the whereabouts of any buses.

“If it’s late, it won’t tell me, and if it’s gone, it won’t tell me that either”, he added.

Being used to this Stagecoach idiocy, I had not bothered to look at the board ( Stagecoach being the company that runs most of the buses round these here parts.)They have timetables and an online app but seem incapable of sticking to what they have scheduled on a fairly regular basis.

To take our minds off the stress of timetable watching, I asked why he was going to Cirencester. “I’m not, it’s just on the way to Bibury, and I change buses there”.

Now, I know Bibury quite well, it’s slap bang in the middle of the Cotswolds: a very small village indeed that gets huge numbers of tourists, almost overwhelming the place, a smart hotel by a trout stream, and a row of picturesque cottages called Arlington Row that have been there for hundreds of years and would not get planning permission today. Probably built with no indoor plumbing back in the day. There’s also a trout farm on the River.

Bibury is a magnet for coach tours, coming second to Moreton in Marsh; both have been tourist hot spots for years and, more recently, even more so. Clogging the places.

Like many of these Proper Cotswold Villages, the locals are more likely to be merchant bankers, hedge fund managers and celebs, rather than sons of the soil.

“I’m going for the fish”, my new acquaintance advised me. That’s a long way to go for fish, I responded. “4 hours round trip, if I’m lucky”, he replied.

“It’s the only place around here where you can get fresh trout like that”, he told me earnestly. They pack it in ice for me, and it keeps well. I thought better of mentioning that four hours on a bus does not constitute ‘around here’.

Here’s a bloke who travels four hours of his day on a bus, comes back with a bag full of ice and a couple of trout. My look of puzzlement must have been apparent. I thought I’d change the subject, gently. He was obviously retired, and told me that since his wife died, he’d given up driving. But the buses were free, so no more car maintenance and all that expense of insurance. I nodded in agreement.

“What did you used to do to fund this trout searching bus riding high life?” I asked? But I put it gentler than that.

“This and that”, came the response.

“Oh, so you worked for GCHQ then?” I opined.

“I’m told that people who work for them don’t talk about it.”

“I think that has changed a little” he said.

The answer was classic GCHQ*.

He was neither going to deny or admit it.

My bus came, I wished him good day

The spy with a penchant for fish, and buses.

Fishy?

*For the uninformed, GCHQ, the Government’s Centre for Espionage and Intelligence, has been based in Cheltenham