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Disciplined in the Bamboo Suite
The mid-afternoon sunshine cast a dappled light, through the thinning foliage of lines of silver birch trees, as residents and visitors went about their business in a wide suburban street in the late autumn. The air was pleasantly warm, but with a slight hint of a cool night to come. It was filled with a cocktail of sound, in which the noise from light passing traffic mingled with the buzz of conversation and laughter, the rhythmic pattern of footsteps with various acoustic characteristics and the chirping and warbling of the local bird population, as it took heed of the lengthening shadows and sang out its Vespers canticles.

Among the pedestrians making their way along the popular thoroughfare, with its elegant Georgian facades on either side of the road, was a young woman in her early thirties. She was walking at a fairly slow, deliberate pace and, although she was obviously navigating her course carefully between other pedestrians, it was clear that she was also deep in thought.

Agnes was, in many ways, an old-fashioned young woman. She had been brought up as the third of five siblings, the offspring of a clergyman, in an affluent provincial parish and his quite-mannered, gentle and kind-hearted wife. She had enjoyed a good childhood and adolescence and had made herself very popular amongst deeper-thinking friends, by her rare blend of incisive thought, clarity of perception, analytical skills and a gift for diplomacy that ought to have seen her career take root in the Foreign Office.

In fact, Agnes had followed a very different career line after graduating from a good red-brick university with a first-class Honours degree in Psychology. As a child and teenager, she had grown up in a climate in which newspaper headlines and news broadcasts often highlighted the troubled state of industrial relations in the United Kingdom. She had read page after page of comment on the consequences of this turbulence for all who were directly affected by it and she had listened with avid interest to numerous discussions involving her father (her mother rarely contributed to such debates) and his colleagues and friends; even the bishop, on one occasion; dealing with the ethical and social complexities of life within industrialised societies. She had been totally absorbed by the passions that the turbulence had engendered and she had been impressed by the efforts of those who had sought to pour the oil of calm and reason upon the troubled waters of strife and conflict. It had, in fact, been such people who had led her to seek a career in conciliation and arbitration, to which her rare blend of characteristics and skills suited her well.

Such is the nature of diplomacy at this level that, no matter how skilled the arbitrator may be and no matter how experienced, the work is bound to affect anyone who is a sentient human being, particularly in cases where all reasonable attempts at bringing people face to face with reality and their duties towards one another lead only to deeper intransigence.