I filed my report on the planning visit to Alex's property two days later, along with my recommendations. The wheels wound slowly into motion, the result of which, some weeks later, was a denial of planning permission for her proposed renovation, along with comments to improve the application.

Alex's response was phone my direct line on a weekend - when, of course, I was not in the office to receive the call - and to leave a lengthy, furious, expletive-ridden voice-mail.

"You're some jumped-up, pathetic little council jobsworth - " she cried indignantly, and sounding quite drunk, " - who probably hates the fact he has to inspect properties which he couldn't afford in a thousand years." She signed off the message by inviting me to copulate with myself, a practical impossibility much like her application.

I listened to the message on Monday morning, and was taken aback at first. I then replayed it a few times and began to find the shrill diatribe to be quite amusing. Colleagues gathered around my desk and I played the message on speaker-phone. One or two laughed; others shook their heads.

"She's like school on a Friday," squealed our unpaid yet persistent and cheery intern Danielle. We others held our collective breath for the mangled punchline, which we had heard before. "No class!" she cried triumphantly. Several seconds passed in silence - though I felt I could hear the noise of her synapses firing weakly, like the reports of a cannonade in the distance, or of residual bath-foam popping its way into oblivion.

"Oh...I mean, school on a Sunday," she corrected.

Office pedant and Talmudic authority Herbert Blankfein spoke up:

"My kids go to Yeshiva classes on Sunday."

Fearing what Danielle might say to that - memories of her cultural clumsiness during the most recent Eid loomed large in my mind - I cleared my throat abruptly and brought the matter back to the voicemail. I explained that I would do nothing, and leave it to Alex to apologise, when or if she sobered up and felt the pangs of a guilty conscience, or at very least developed a sense of how she had jeopardised any future planning applications.

(As with any public sector employment characterised by relatively low pay and a relatively high degree of power over our fellow humans,  corruption is inevitable. We have long memories, and if you attack one inspector, you attack all inspectors. We're like the police in that respect, only without recourse to tasers and firearms.)

Two weeks passed and I heard nothing from her, and, but for my preternaturally capacious and well ordered memory banks, would have long forgotten the issue. As I was packing up to leave the office at quarter to five on a Wednesday afternoon, the telephone rang.

"Newton's phone", I announced. (Newton is my first name - not, alas, after the British pioneering physicist Isaac, but for the German pioneering eroticist Helmut.)

"It's me," said my interlocutor, a woman whose voice I recognised at once. "I think I owe you an apology," she said. "Can I take you for dinner?"