We’ll soon be horsing down donkey meat for dinner

DID you wonder how characters in the Jason Bourne movies get through airports and over frontiers without being caught?

It’s the norm to be fingerprinted and have your picture taken, and passports have microchips and barcodes: it would be impossible unless you had a fancy, hi-tech passport-making machine.

Of course, we are supposed to infer from these films that secret agents have all sorts of dark skills that we can’t even imagine: that they can hack computers and disguise themselves as a rucksack or a banana split.