Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (16 page)

What do you think about that? Do my standards matter? Do I even have any standards any more? My wife doesn’t think so, for a start. I told Beth about it, of course. I asked her the same question last night, and do you know what she did? She started crying.

She said, ‘You sold your standards when you started working for that paper.’ And then she said, ‘Whenever they tell you to jump you always jump. You don’t ask how high, you just jump as high as you can and hope it’s high enough.’ And then she said, ‘What’s happening to you? What’s happened to us? We used to laugh, we used to have a laugh. And now… you’re always stressed and I’m always in a shitty mood and all we do is argue and worry.’

And then she told me she loves me. And I told her I love her too. And we both started crying because it’s true but we keep forgetting it, what with life and everything getting in the way. How did that happen? How did life get in the way?

When we first moved here, Martin, to Oxford, out of London and into our dream little terraced house, it was always better. I might have the rose-tinted aviators on here, but the way I remember it, everything was better then. How is that? It can’t just be about Sylvie – and it can’t just be about my job. Can it?

The thing is, we don’t do stuff now. We used to do stuff. We even went punting once. (Actually, I lie: we went punting twice. The first time was on a glorious afternoon in May, the kind of afternoon where every cliché about Oxford in the spring is duly ticked off – the students in black tie swigging champagne after their exams, the thwack of leather on willow in Christ Church meadows and University Parks, the dons asleep in the Botanical Gardens, and on the river, sparkling in the sun and drifting gently with the apple blossom down to Folly Bridge, dozens of punts, filled (mostly) with the young and beautiful and carefree. And us with them, sharing a bottle of white and zigzagging our way along. The second time… well, the second time was later that night, after the pubs shut, when we were good and plastered and decided to nick a boat and punt our way home, like pirates. We got about eight feet downriver before I overbalanced and took us both overboard.)

We used to go to gigs together, Martin. We even went to the theatre. We hung out in the cafe at the modern art gallery and walked out to little pubs in the country. We did couple stuff, the stuff couples do. And if love is an endless afternoon, it felt like an endless afternoon. An endless afternoon in the summer.

And now she’s away this weekend and I’ve lost my standards. And as if to prove it, today I’m going to write something gratuitously nasty about a bunch of stupid kids on a reality TV show and tomorrow night I’m getting drunk with Train Girl.

Standards, Martin. Always the standards.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, September 30.

Dear Dan

Thank you for your two most recent letters, I am sorry to hear your morning commute to work has been disrupted again. The problem on Thursday was related to communication issues at Network Rail’s end of things, and on Friday all of the trains were delayed after a malfunctioning door at one of our depots resulted in some carriages being unable to be put in to service until later in the day. As I’m sure you appreciate, both events were the kind of unforeseen problems that one simply cannot plan for.

I do hope, however, that such ‘acts of God’ will not put you off continuing to travel with Premier Westward, and I can assure you that we strive every day to maintain the standards for which we have become rightly famous.

Best

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, October 4. Amount of my day wasted: 13 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Train Girl, Lego Head, Competitive Tech Nerds, Universal Grandpa.

Dear Martin

Are you OK? Did you write that last letter to me drunk? Are you having some kind of episode? What on earth are you talking about? Acts of God? Have you lost your marbles completely?

I think perhaps it’s best if we forget you ever wrote that last letter to me at all and simply agree to move on and never mention the whole embarrassing business again. But really: acts of God? As the editor of
Amazeballs!
might say, WTF?

Besides: there are so many more interesting things to talk about. There’s news to report, home and away. And as well as all that, there’s dirt to be dug!

(Did you see my column on Sunday? What did you think of this new slant we’re taking, this aggressive new stance we’re adopting? Did you like the bit where I described that unfortunate girl with the eating disorder as ‘Moominmamma with a meat-feast pizza for a face’? Or the way I basically outed that over-aggressive Geordie lad as a secret bisexual by judicious employment of the phrase ‘a real man’s man’? Were you impressed with the sarcasm? With the use of fair comment to disguise a load of unsubstantiated insults? Did it tickle you how I appeared to have not only thrown away my standards but done so with gay abandon and, actually, appeared to have rather enjoyed it? I do hope so!

Universal Grandpa seemed to be impressed, anyway. ‘My daughter liked your column again on Sunday,’ he told me, as we waited for the train to arrive this morning. ‘She said to tell you you’re a saucy devil.’

‘Well, in that case,’ I replied, ‘tell her it takes one to know one.’ And then I thought: what am I doing? Flirting with an old man’s daughter I’ve never met – and doing it through the old man himself? That’s got to be wrong on soooo many levels.)

Anyway, we’ll see today what the fallout is. We’ll see what the lawyers made of it. Goebbels seemed to like it, anyway. ‘It’s a start,’ was his text on Sunday morning. That was all. A start.

Actually, perhaps we won’t hear from the lawyers today. The lawyers look set for a busy time of it again; it looks like the lawyers may have bigger fish to pull out of the fire and back into the frying pan. If yesterday was anything to go by, the court case is picking up pace again. There were developments, Martin!

It seems our syrup-sporting friend is rather enjoying his moment in the sun. Or rather, his lawyer is. (It seems to me that his lawyer sees himself as a bit of an amateur entertainer himself. There are too many verbal flourishes, a little too much grandstanding, for an ordinary performance. I can’t help thinking that he’s seeing this as his chance to impress, to be noticed, to make a name for himself. Lawyers, singers, byline-hungry journalists: we’re all the same, really, aren’t we? All hopping up and down, desperate to be seen, shouting ‘look at me, everyone’ to anyone who’ll listen, ready to drop our standards at a moment’s notice.)

So. That stuff in the Royal Courts of Justice yesterday. That talk of iceberg tips and avalanches (I love a good mixed metaphor!), of this case ‘not being extraordinary, but, rather, horribly ordinary’, of all the crimes (are they crimes?) we supposedly inflicted upon the poor helpless pup – the listening, and following, and fabricating, the interceptions and investigations and harassment and honey traps – being ‘standard practice’ and ‘accepted practice’ and ‘just another day at the
Globe
office’.

And then the specifics. That nosy-neighbour-type they wheeled out, the net-curtain-twitching lady of a certain age who told how she used to see photographers hiding in the bushes; the postman who fessed up to taking a bung for the loan of his uniform for an hour one afternoon (oldest trick in the book – everyone trusts a postman at the door); the florist who said the same of her van (who can resist flowers?); the parade of doe-eyed, flicky-haired girls who recounted the huge sums of money they were promised for a camera-phone snap of our man
in flagrante
. (Notice they only called up the ones who turned the money down. There were plenty who didn’t.)

And after all that, rather brilliantly it has to be said, the dismissal of all their evidence – by the man who had called them to the stand in the first place – as ‘trivia’ and ‘hardly worth bothering with’. These aren’t the real crimes, he said. The dynamite is still to come. The dynamite in this case… and in many more cases after this.

‘If anyone thinks for a moment that my client is the only man to have suffered such shocking treatment at the hands of this “organ”, then do please think again,’ he said, waving a piece of paper. ‘I have here a list of names several dozen long who have all approached me for similar representation. This case may be the first to be brought, but it will not be the last. And it almost certainly will not be the most shocking.’

It will not be the last. That’s not good. That’s going to get everyone nervous. But what was that last line about? Not the most shocking? What’s the story there?

I can’t help wondering who he’s got on that list. I mean, if it is just a bunch of has-beens and wannabes and nearly-weres all out to make a buck on the back of a little press intrusion, that’s one thing. And even if it’s proper celebs, or public officials, or MPs… I reckon that’s dealable with too. A Public Interest defence goes a long way. Everyone’s got skeletons to expose.

But if it’s something else… well, let’s not go there again. Like I said back in August, that stuff about the mobile phone of the mother of the best-known victim of the Beast of Berkhamsted – it’s just rumours. Just newsroom paranoia. Not even the gutter-dwelling, scum-wallowing
Globe
would stoop to hacking the families of murder victims. We wouldn’t bother with normals at all. What would be the point? Where’s the Public Interest defence in that?

No, despite what some are muttering, I don’t reckon there are any ordinaries on that list of his. I’m sure it’s just another flock of whining, over-pampered, double-standard-touting celebs looking for a bit of publicity, cash, and revenge. Although it will be interesting to hear what the older boys on the news desk make of it.

And meanwhile, back in the real world, things are moving again too. The newest government in the world (to be accurate, I’m not sure they’re actually a government yet, as opposed to a rag-tag people’s militia who’ve found themselves in charge) are trying to find their feet. Job one: make sure that victory’s not Pyrrhic.

You remember Pyrrhic victories, right? When the cost of winning makes victory worthless? Well, it seems that’s where our brave revolutionaries seem to be finding themselves. I’m not even talking about the whole moral side of things – despite the whole head-on-a-stick unpleasantness back in the Imperial Palace last week. I’m talking about the actual physical cost of taking the country.

Harry the Dog told me on Saturday that the real action’s not even begun yet. Keep an eye on the borders, he reckons. Those neighbouring countries – with leaders every bit as nasty in their own way as the man we saw ripped apart on live TV last week – are eyeing up events with interest. They could have intervened, one way or another, months ago. They didn’t. And the question is why?

They’ve got standing armies. And, according to Harry’s sources, all leave has been cancelled. Those standing armies aren’t going to be standing for too much longer. There’s a whole nation there with borders wide open, a bunch of peasants in charge and seemingly no international community interested in backing them up.

There are three neighbouring regimes eyeing the place up, Martin. And according to Harry the Dog at least, it’s going to simply be a matter of who reaches the capital first.

So, as they say in California, like totally Pyrrhic, right?

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, October 5. Amount of my day wasted: zero minutes. Fellow sufferers: Train Girl, Guilty New Mum, Lego Head, Universal Grandpa, Competitive Tech Nerds.

Check it out! High drama on the morning train! It all went off on the 07.31, as someone once said. (OK, nobody’s ever said that, but you know what I mean.)

Today’s the day Lego Head cracked. And it was pretty terrifying. (There’s also swearing, Martin, just so you’re warned. If you’re of a sensitive disposition, look away now.)

I know that technically there was no actual delay on this train, but I couldn’t wait to tell you all about it. It’s huge, Martin. It’s amazing. Unprecedented. And I’ve got to tell you about it now. You don’t mind, do you? You probably owe me a few minutes from somewhere along the line.

So. Things started as usual. Everyone in their usual places on the platform, the Coach C regulars rooted to the same spots as always, shuffling forwards to the yellow line (do not cross the yellow line!) as the train heaved itself heavily alongside. The nod and the wink to Universal Grandpa at the door, the sympathetic smile to Guilty New Mum as she bustled and panicked her way down the aisle, dropping a diary and a bottle of Calpol out of her handbag, phone glued to the ear as usual, letting Sue know all about her latest troubles with the croup (‘And now I’ve only brought the pissing Calpol to work with me and left my glasses on the bathroom shelf. Which means I’m not only blind all day and am going to have to bluff it through the whole stupid G8 thing but we’re going to have to get another bottle of Calpol in case she worsens this morning…’).

Train Girl turned up late, like always, flying down the platform and blowing a kiss at the guard as he held open the door for her and tried to look stern, landing on the seat next to me with a laugh and a pair of scalding coffees. And before we’d cleared the outskirts of Oxford, the Competitive Tech Nerds were at it again, showing off home music studio apps to each other on their iPads (like either of them have any need for a home music studio anyway. Who do they think they are? Brian Eno?).