Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (22 page)

And you know what? I’ve got nothing left to say. We’re running over 20 minutes late, I’m nearly home, and I’ve got nothing left to say. Except thank God I’ve got the next two days off.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re: Out of Office Reply

Dear Sir/Madam

Thank you for your email dated November 12 this year. I can confirm that Mr Harbottle has received it and will endeavour to respond as soon as possible. Your concerns are of utmost importance to us.

Thank you again for writing to Premier Westward.

pp Martin Harbottle, Managing Director

*This is an automatically generated response. Please do not reply*

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
22.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, November 15. Amount of my day wasted: seven minutes. Fellow sufferers: Overkeen Estate Agent.

Where are you? What’s happened? An automatically generated response? That’s new. When did you work that one out? Or – and perhaps I’m getting paranoid here – did you actually write that ‘automatically generated’ response yourself? Are you just pretending not to be about?

I do hope not. It wouldn’t be the same, writing to you like this, if I thought you weren’t interested in what I had to say. There’s the train stuff, obviously, but also all the other jazz I bang on about. The stuff at home, the stuff at work. Sauron Flesh Harrower and the virtual romance of the virtual century. Aren’t you supposed to be my shrink? Aren’t you adopting the role of father figure, adviser, therapist? I’m trying to get it all off my chest here, Martin, I’m trying to work all this stuff out with you, and it wouldn’t feel the same if you were to start making up automatically generated responses in order to avoid having to write back.

So. Stay with me. Please don’t go. Please don’t pretend to be a computer program to avoid speaking to me. Please listen to what work was like today.

Martin: work was… weird. You know that phrase ‘siege mentality’? Well, it’s a siege mentality at our place right now. And that’s because we’re under siege. Literally.

The TV crews, with their tripods and cameras and big furry mics, their tie-smoothing presenters with slicked-down hair and nervous glances at notes, their rows of vans with great awkward aerials and outsized satellite dishes plonked on top. The radio reporters, with their huge earphones and their faraway frowns and their scurrying about with bulky battery packs slung round their necks. The print journalists, lounging in packs, smoking fags, flicking through pages of shorthand, cracking cynical jokes and swearing.

They’re all there. Outside our office, front and back. From first thing in the morning to last thing at night. Every now and then one will attempt to make it inside the building, sauntering to the door all casual-like, spinning a line about coming from this PR firm or that, trying it on with a story about being sent from IT to look at a problem with the servers in the newsroom, before being bundled back out again by security, to laughter and applause from all the other hacks.

They’re enjoying themselves out there. They’re having fun. And I completely understand why: it is fun, when you’re after a story, when you’ve got the whole pack with you and there’s a pub just round the corner and you’re all agreed on what the official line might be (unless something really newsworthy happens – and then it’s every man for himself). It’s a laugh.

It’s not such a laugh watching it from the other side though.

It wasn’t so much that I felt harassed, or hounded, or any of those other words people use about press attention. I didn’t feel like anyone was invading my privacy. I didn’t feel violated or abused by the press attention. To be honest, I didn’t mind it at all really – the camera lenses and flashes and faces with notebooks thrust forward; the shouted questions and accusations – I was fine with all that, actually. They’re only doing their jobs, after all. I know quite a few of them and they’re OK lads, mostly.

No, not harassed. I felt… jealous. I wanted to be out with them, on the scent of a good story. Not stuck in the office, the subject of the story. It didn’t seem fair, somehow. Why should they have all the fun?

It’s an odd feeling, Martin, when you’re right there in the midst of the biggest story of the year, and you can’t write a word about it. It’s an odd feeling being part of the story, being on the inside looking out. I don’t want to be on the inside looking out. I want to be where I usually am: on the outside looking in. Reporting. Bringing the news to the masses. Not being the news. Not having to rely on other people’s version of events.

Anyway. I’ve used up my word count for the day, I’ve accounted for all the time in this particular delay. Till next time, Martin – or Martin’s automatically generated email response system. Whichever one of you feels most compelled to write back.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re: Out of Office Reply

Dear Sir/Madam

Thank you for your email dated November 15 this year. I can confirm that Mr Harbottle has received it and will endeavour to respond as soon as possible. Your concerns are of utmost importance to us.

Thank you again for writing to Premier Westward.

pp Martin Harbottle, Managing Director

*This is an automatically generated response. Please do not reply*

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, November 17. Amount of my day wasted: seven minutes. Fellow sufferers: Lego Head, Universal Grandpa, Guilty New Mum.

Oh, Martin. Maybe you really have gone. Maybe you really are ignoring me. Maybe the joke’s worn thin. Maybe since last weekend I’m no longer the sort of person you want to be receiving letters from. Maybe you no longer care about the train company you purport to run.

Well, whatever. I’ll carry on regardless. My trains are still getting delayed, your company is still not doing what I’m paying you to make sure it does, the principle remains and I shall keep going. I’ve got used to it now. And since Train Girl and I no longer sit together in the mornings, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

Talking of Train Girl… I told Beth about Train Girl last night. As you know, things have been better at home recently. We haven’t had an argument in weeks, we’ve started going out together a bit again, started talking again, started laughing again… and so I thought I should tell Beth about Train Girl. Because I don’t want us to become the kind of married couple who keep secrets from each other, the kind of married couple who’ve stopped bothering, stopped trying, stopped making the effort to impress each other. And also because nothing actually happened between me and Train Girl anyway.

As we sat down to dinner together (and that’s a new development too), as the pasta steamed on our plates and the glass of wine dully reflected our happily married faces back at us, I told my wife all about Train Girl.

And here’s what I told her. I told her that back when we were barely talking to each other, back when things felt like they weren’t going so well, when she spent more time with Mr Blair and the other mums than she did with me, I told her that back then, I made a friend.

I told her that my friend and I sat next to each other on the train every morning, that my friend and I had even gone out drinking a couple of times in London together. I told her my friend was funny and smart… and then I told her that I had decided we shouldn’t be friends any more.

‘And this is the really funny bit,’ I said. ‘You’ll love this, Beth, this’ll really crack you up. I decided we shouldn’t be friends any more because I actually think she might have fancied me! Can you believe it?’

Turns out she could believe it. Turns out she believed I fancied Train Girl right back. Or that I at least encouraged her. And so for the rest of the evening, the rest of the night in fact, as the pasta was left ignored, slowly congealing and rubberising on our plates, as the glass of wine became a bottle, and then another bottle, my wife went into a major sulk. And I, her loving husband, sulked back.

Great, eh? It’s good to talk. It’s lovely that a man and his wife can sit down over dinner and discuss their relationship, their feelings. I feel so lucky that I don’t keep secrets from my wife.

At least I’ve still got you, Martin. You wouldn’t sulk at me, would you? You wouldn’t accuse me of things I hadn’t done with beautiful girls I’d deliberately turned down because I love my wife. Would you? Of course not! That would be unreasonable of you, for a start. And for another thing – you’re just an automatically generated email response. It’s not like you care, or anything.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re: Out of Office Reply

Dear Sir/Madam

Thank you for your email dated November 17 this year. I can confirm that Mr Harbottle has received it and will endeavour to respond as soon as possible. Your concerns are of utmost importance to us.

Thank you again for writing to Premier Westward.

pp Martin Harbottle, Managing Director

*This is an automatically generated response. Please do not reply*

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
22.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, November 23. Amount of my day wasted: nine minutes. Fellow sufferers: Overkeen Estate Agent.

Hi, Martin’s automatically generated response system! Hope your hard drive remains uncorrupted. I must say, you may not have the eloquence of your human namesake, but at least you reply every time I write. That’s something. That’s a start.

It’s still open season on the
Globe
. The reporters, the TV cameras, the satellite vans are still laying siege to our offices; the papers and radio reports and news bulletins are still full of juicy details about our shameful practices. And now the commentators are getting in on the action. The columnists. And there’s nothing a good columnist likes better than making it personal. (That’s what a good columnist does, of course: he makes the universal human. He takes the big experience, the big story, and finds the everyday angle.)

What has that meant in today’s papers? Ooh, only a big piece in one of the ‘qualities’ about the ‘ongoing culture of nastiness’ at our place. A culture the columnist feels is illustrated best by… my column.

‘A carnival of nastiness’ is how she described it. ‘A sarcastic parade of snide jokes and sneering double-entendres.’ Also: ‘bullying’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘an exercise in sailing as close to the legal wind as possible, while simultaneously implying and insinuating as much as the defamation laws will allow’. Oh – and before I forget: ‘An example of how the very worst of the
Globe
’s old attitudes still exist at the paper.’

A bit harsh, I thought. A touch over the top. Sure, I go after some people a bit – but only ever celebrities, only ever those who signed up for the whole deal in the first place. God knows they make enough money hawking out their own lives. They started it: I’m just redressing the debt a little.

Anyway, screw them, There’s bigger fish frying in the world right now. There’s more important stuff going down. (Is it arrogant and bullying of me to mention myself before the new war in North Africa? Have I unconsciously elevated myself above a whole nation’s tragedy?)

Christmas: that’s what I had in the sweepstake. And they didn’t even make it to the end of November. What the hell’s wrong with them? Could they not see the writing on the border walls? They only managed to depose a whole dictatorship a few months ago, now they can’t even hang on to what they’ve got. Last night, Neighbouring Regime blinked.

And by ‘blinked’ I of course mean ‘invaded’. All that talk of guarding their own borders, of acting against the threat of terrorism… last night they stopped pretending and just steamed in there. The tanks, the heavy guns, the air support, and behind them the ground troops. Streaming through the sand like battalions of furious beetles. Village after village across the desert fell (they could hardly do anything else) and even as NATO and the UN and the EU and all the others protested, they powered on, claiming all in their path for the glory of Allah. You’ll be reading about the war crimes later, about what they did to those in their path, about the human cost. And I lost my money again.

By the time I write, some 20-odd hours since the invasion began, only the capital remains. A country nearly twice the size of France and they just cut through it all in less than a day – and it would have been even quicker too, if their tanks could only move a bit faster. Only the capital to go, and in the capital, in the old Imperial Palace, what’s left of the raggle-taggle revolutionary army are bedding down and digging in and preparing for the worst.

It’s going to be a long night. A long night in front of News 24 for baby and me. (Just as well I’m sleeping in the front room at the moment then, eh? Just as well there’s a war to watch, in between updates on the latest lows in the history of the scandal-ridden
Globe…
)

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re: Out of Office Reply

Dear Sir/Madam

Thank you for your email dated November 23 this year. I can confirm that Mr Harbottle has received it and will endeavour to respond as soon as possible. Your concerns are of utmost importance to us.