Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (10 page)

I am also sorry to hear things continue to be difficult at home. The first months after the birth of a child do place enormous strain on a couple, and clearly the long hours necessitated by your career don’t help. In my experience (for what it’s worth) there is little to be gained by arguing with your wife, no matter how unjust you feel any accusations might be. As I’m sure you appreciate, she is in a very heightened emotional state, with all sorts of hormones flying around her body, and as such may say things that she would not mean otherwise.

I remember clearly my own wife repeatedly threatening to ‘take an axe and a can of petrol’ to my shed in the early days after the birth of our first. My tactic was simply to shrug and tell her she must do what she thinks best, despite the shed housing my irreplaceable collection of ultra-narrow-gauge vintage replica railway engines. Of course she never carried out her threat. My collection remains safe!

I do sincerely hope things improve at home, but if you want the advice of someone who has been through all that (twice) many years ago, then I would suggest you simply stick it out. It does get easier!

Best

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
20.03 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Plymouth, August 6. Amount of my day wasted: 14 minutes. Fellow sufferers: no regulars (Saturday).

How’s life treating you, Martin? Crumpets and honey, I hope. Whiskers on kittens and, er, what was it, bright copper kettles? You get the idea, anyway. I hope you’re well.

Today’s letter, as promised, will stick to the facts. Just the facts, ma’am! I promise not to bore on about my boring home life. Today, we’re going to get back to our roots, back to our original
raison d’être
, back to the real reason we’re here. Today, Martin, we talk of trains!

But first… today’s letter is going to need a little explanation. Some clarification. You’ll observe from the lines above that I caught the Plymouth train last night. I didn’t go to Plymouth last night. (Why would I want to go to Plymouth? What is there in Plymouth anyway? Apart from Plymouth Hoe, I mean. And the National Marine Aquarium. And the National Armada Memorial, the Mayflower Steps, Crownhill Fort and Smeaton’s Tower. And of course Home Park, stamping ground of Plymouth Argyle Football Club and a veritable am-dram venue of dreams. But apart from that, really, what is there in Plymouth?)

So I didn’t go to Plymouth.

What I did do was go to Reading. (Again.) What I did do was try to be clever.

Now I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say exactly what Mr Morrison, my old head of Sixth Form and as fine a chap as one might ever encounter, said. He said: ‘You’re clever, Daniel, but you’re not as clever as you think you are. And if your cleverness doesn’t get you in trouble, your lack of cleverness will.’ Pretty deep, eh? He was a deep guy.

And guess what? He was right, too! It’s only taken about 15 years, but bless me if the old feller wasn’t proved on the money in the end! Here’s how, and listen closely, it’s a properly fascinating tale. And we’ve got 14 minutes to waste together in the telling…

So. Last night, I got out of work early. I was out by seven. On a Saturday. Amazing. It seems I’m still the darling of the news desk. I’m still in Goebbels’ good books (we’re lunching (drinking) next week. There’s talk of promotion. There’s talk of putting me on the fast track once all this unpleasantness with the high court dies down. Once that crooner sees sense and shuts up, once the other celebs stop bleating and the police stop sniffing around and the other newspapers get back in their boxes. Things are looking up!)

Still buoyed by an impressive England performance (to hold on for a draw like that, after the boy Best’s early dismissal, was impressive. To dig in as they did, after the tempestuous Number 9 was sent for an early bath, showed real grit) I headed west with head held high.

And having just missed the 19.50 (one word: tourists. Actually, eight words: tourists standing still in front of ticket barriers. And escalators. Ten words, then) I looked at the timetables, I did a few quick mental calculations, I weighed up the options, balanced the probabilities, bounced around the maths, crossed the i’s and dotted the t’s and made what I thought was a clever decision.

I decided to hop on the 20.03 to Plymouth, jump out at Reading at exactly the allotted time it was due to arrive there (according to your timetable) of 20.32 and then, after a merry skip up the escalators, over the footbridge and down the steps to Platform 7, leap gaily onto the 20.41 to Birmingham New Street, due in to Oxford at 21.05.

Brilliant! And, with the bonus of having to only endure a Premier Westward train for half my journey home.

Oh, can you imagine the sheer scale of self-congratulation that was happening in my tiny mind last night? Can you? I all-but-swaggered on to that train, so confident was I that I’d finally cracked the system. After all, with nine minutes to spare at Reading, I was assured of making that connection, right? Right?

Wrong.

I blame myself. I was obviously too clever. Or not clever enough. Or not as clever as I thought I was. Or some horrid Mr Morrison-vindicating combination of the three. Of course I should have guessed that the train would not arrive at Reading at the time it was supposed to. Of course I should have known that nine minutes’ grace would not suffice. I felt so stupid!

I stepped off that train at Reading a broken man. And then I waited 15 minutes or so for the next fast train to Oxford. And instead of arriving energised and optimistic into the city of dreaming spires at a credible 21.05, I trundled in weary and dreary at 21.19. A victim of my own half-cocked attempts at cleverness.

You know what happened? I flew too close to the sun. I got my wings all melted off. I’m like that Greek lad. Whatsischops. Icarus. I’m exactly like Icarus.

So how did I recover? How does one bounce back from a thing like that?

All I can say is, thank the Lord for
Celebrity Big Brother
. I shushed Beth to bed, settled down with Sylvie on my lap and a cooling bottle of beer in my hand (this heat! When’s it going to break?), tuned the television in and all was well with the world again. Do you watch? Are you addicted? Oh, you should. It’s brilliant. It’s a tonic.

Why, if it wasn’t for the hilarious antics of those cringing C-listers and desperate D-listers (and in a few notable cases DD-listers… actually, that’s rather a good joke, isn’t it? DD-listers? I might use that next week, in the new
Celebrity Big Brother
column the editor wants. There’s no official word on whose name will go at the top of it, but Goebbels has been making some seriously encouraging noises), if it wasn’t for their adorable stupidity, their puppyish willingness to impress, to jump through hoops, to sit and stand, beg and roll over for our amusement… why if it wasn’t for these brilliantly desperate, wonderfully awful people, then I would have gone to bed with all my previous intellectual confidence shot.

I say it again. Thank the Lord for
Celebrity Big Brother
! Thank the Lord for celebrities – for being so venal and self-obsessed and narcissistic that we all can’t help but shine in comparison.

What do you think? Are you in love with the antics of adorable Essex girl and stunning tabloid lovely (she’s my DD-list celeb) Nikki Nyce? Do the post-rehab ramblings of washed-up-by-her-mid-20s American actress Candy Crush give you hope for humanity? Do the macho poses and Neanderthal postulations of former-player-turned-pundit and the man they call football’s Mr Controversy, Graeme Green, make you laugh out loud?

Will the stream-of-consciousness gibberish and preening, fatuous codswallop they all spout – and actually seem to believe – reset all our disoriented moral compasses and revitalise all our flagging intellects?

If there’s one thing the
Celebrity Big Brother
house is teaching me, it is that no matter how stupid I am, or how stupid I do, I’m never going to be as stupid as some. And that, my learned friend, is a beautiful lesson to learn.

It almost gives me hope!

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, August 9. Amount of my day wasted: 19 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Train Girl, Lego Head, Universal Grandpa, Guilty New Mum.

Martin, I very much hope you’re well. Are you well?

Believe it or not, I ask that sincerely. I want to know. I don’t get to talk to anyone properly, not really, not these days. Work is work and home is… well, home.

I used to talk to my mum and dad, of course, but they’re no longer around. Not that they’d offer solutions or anything – but that’s not what people talk to their parents for anyway, is it? When you talk to your parents, you just want them to listen. And listen some more. And nod and tut and sigh in the right places. And then tell you it will all be all right in the end. And by talking to them, by having them listen, you kind of work it out for yourself.

At least, that’s how it was for me. Is that what you do with your kids when they call home from university? Do you just let them talk? Do you listen – or do you try to offer advice, too?

I used to have quite long chats in this way, with my dad. Me doing all the talking, he doing all the listening. Seems quite odd, in retrospect, but at the time it felt completely natural. And I’d always feel better afterwards.

Actually, I lie. He would offer advice, in his own way. He’d make crosswords for me, wordsearches, meticulously drawn little games for me to play, one with every letter they’d send to me at uni or, later, in London. And the clues, the answers… often as not they’d have their own advice. Just words, Martin. But the right words.

I miss that. I miss those crosswords. I miss being told the right words.

But look at me – I’m getting soft! I’m not writing to you to harp on about my dead dad. I’m writing to complain!

For example, I spent 19 minutes more on your train this morning than I had originally intended (or you’d originally promised, when I paid for the ticket). Nineteen minutes! What’s all that about, Martin?

But on the other hand, my morning trains aren’t so bad these days. Not now I have a friend. Train Girl and I: we sit together now, side by side in Coach C (a third of the way up, on the right, facing the direction of travel). We sit and we talk, and we laugh, all the way from Oxford to London. So perhaps I do have someone to talk to properly, after all. Perhaps.

She works in PR. That’s why she was looking at bylines in the paper three weeks ago. That’s how she recognised me. She’s funny and smart and actually rather beautiful (not that I’m looking or anything, not that her looks have anything to do with our friendship at all) and she gets my jokes and she makes pretty good jokes herself. She lives in a little flat in the city centre, she’s single, she says she prefers it that way. She says she never has to go looking for a date – she’s always got plenty of options. She says that if she’s in the mood for a, er, ‘date’ then she rarely has any trouble finding a suitable candidate. She’s cool. She’s funny and smart and independent and liberated and cool. And she’s got good legs. (Not that I’ve noticed, really.)

And she listens to me. (You listen to me too, of course, but you don’t really have any choice in the matter. Train Girl listens to me through choice. She chooses to sit next to me and listen – there’s a big difference there.)

When I talk about the ups and downs of work and the weirdness of home, she listens. She even seems interested.

And home is weird. Home is still weird. Beth and I – we’re still not talking, not really, not much besides baby updates, Sylvie headlines, 24-hour rolling Sylvie news… but she at least doesn’t seem to be as depressed as she was. Those coffee mornings are helping. The coffee mornings and the afternoon playdates. Most afternoons she’s over at someone’s house now, eating biscuits and drinking (more) coffee and watching Sylvie make friends. Most afternoons it’s Mr Blair’s house, in fact, with Mr Blair’s one-year-old son. Apparently it doesn’t really matter that he’s eight months older than Sylvie: it’s the stimulation she’s getting that’s important. And the stimulation Beth’s getting too, I guess.

Actually, you know what? I tell a lie. We are talking, Beth and I: we’re talking about Mr Blair. About how brave he is, to carry the burden of single parentdom after his wife upped and left (so I was right about that). About how much he cares for his little boy, how he’s given up everything to look after him. About how committed he is to the environment, and to fair trade, and to the rights of Taiwanese factory workers (or whatever). About how he not only reads the
Guardian
, he regularly writes letters to the
Guardian
. About how beautiful and tasteful and fashionably minimalist his charming half-a-million-quid house in Jericho is.

Yes, we talk about Mr Blair. Good old Mr Blair, eh?

(We don’t talk about Train Girl. What would be the point? Beth would only get funny about her. She’d only get depressed again.)

So there are some positives. And work too: there’s some good stuff happening at work. We can take inspiration from that. I’ve got my
Celebrity Big Brother
half-page – and it’s got my name on the top of it. Three hundred bylined words every week guaranteed: and a chance to show I can handle a column. I’m no longer writing anonymous NIBs and I’m no longer the news desk’s whipping boy. It’s all good. It’s all coming together.

But then, as we know from our discussions about Pyrrhic victories, there’s always bad stuff to go with the good, right? There’s always good stuff and bad stuff together. That’s the way the world works. Take North Africa: there’s the good stuff we already know about, but then there’s the flipside. The recent stuff. The refusal of the vicious old dictator to go. The urgings to fight to the death. The… well, the death. All the deaths.