Intriguing gossip reaches The Diary's Charterhouse Street bunker of an incident involving a lawyer with a respectable regional firm of solicitors, who was apparently pulled out of an urgent meeting earlier this year for an unusual reason. The incident in question came after the reception desk had already made increasingly frantic yet fruitless attempts to summon the senior lawyer, whom we will refer to only as 'Mr Whippet'.
Given the failure of the man in question to appear, the receptionist resorted to the slightly more urgent plea: "Could Mr Whippet please report to reception – your car is on fire."
At this point our man managed to find a window in his schedule, only to see that his car was indeed on fire in the firm's car park.
Differing accounts have been told to your faithful correspondent as to what could have caused the mystery blaze, but the most entertaining involves the discovery of a hairdryer that had been left in the car by a female passenger of the legal eagle.
The Diary cannot, of course, bring himself to comment publicly on the identity of the luckless solicitor, but inquiries over a pint at the Bishop's Finger could prove fruitful to the curious.