Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (2 page)

I’m guessing that in your case, becoming a grown-up was simply the next logical stage in your development. I’m guessing it was inevitable. Like puberty. Like acne. I’m guessing you saw becoming a grown-up as nothing more dramatic than the thing that comes after leaving university.

And then what? Find a girl, settle down, if you want to you can marry? Look at me, I am old but I’m happy? Cat Stevens knew it. Despite it all, he knew what being a grown-up meant.

(Obviously Cat Stevens’ life should not be taken as a literal model for how to be a grown-up. Let’s not do anything rash now. Abandoning your career at the height of your success and vowing never to pick up the instrument of your success again is obviously – or rather, *obvs*, as they say in our magazine supplement – not that sensible, or responsible, or adult-like. It’s not something many school career advisers would recommend. But you know what I mean. The lyrics to ‘Father to Son’: they’re about becoming a grown-up, right? They’re about the melancholy inevitability of having to become a grown-up. It’s a song about accepting defeat. It’s a song about surrender.)

Where was I? Oh yes. Growing up. I can imagine you were always quite a sensible boy, Martin. A sensible boy, and then a good bloke, and now a steady chap. And then what? A nice old gent… and then fondly remembered. That’s life. That’s the epitaph.

But that, I suppose, is how you get to be Managing Director of a company like Premier Westward. And not someone who writes about reality TV wannabes and scandalised soap starlets and disgraced pop flops and lecherous actors and priapic footballers and self-loathing WAGs for a living.

Oh dear. It doesn’t sound much like I enjoy my job there, does it? It doesn’t sound like I get off on what I do. Please don’t think that! You couldn’t be more wrong! It’s just the delay that’s put me in a bad mood, it’s just your rotten trains that are souring my normally sunny disposition. The truth is, I love my job. You wanna hear a secret? I’d probably do it for free. I may not be getting the bylines or the glory every week, but still. I’d probably do it for free.

Don’t get me wrong, I need the money. God knows I need the money – if it wasn’t for the money I certainly wouldn’t sit on these trains every morning and evening, an hour each way (when they run on time). If it wasn’t for the money and the fact I need to be a grown-up now, after too many years of spectacularly failing to be a grown-up. If it wasn’t for all that… I’d do it for free.

I’m a good bloke, obviously, a loving husband and father, but I’m also a tabloid journalist. And that makes me a professional bastard. I basically think I’m better than everyone else and at the same time worry that nobody else really realises it. It makes me think I’m always right (even when I sort of know, inside, I may be wrong). Because the
Sunday Globe
– it is always right, isn’t it? It tells the world what’s right – and more often, what’s wrong.

We work in absolutes. Black and white and read all over. No grey areas for us! When I write my little bits and bobs, my news in briefs, when I lay it all out for our millions of readers, I can’t afford to see both sides. It’s not what they want – and it’s not what my boss wants. They call it ‘taking a line’ in the tabloid game, Martin. We’ve got to take a line on every story. We’ve got to believe we’re right, or we’re scuppered.

And do you want to hear a secret? I may only wallow in the shallow end, but I’m absolutely in love with it. With the celebrity world. I’m obsessed by it. I live and breathe it. And I also hate just about everyone involved in it. I think they’re vain, shallow, venal, self-obsessed, back-stabbing monsters. (And that’s just the cast of
Hollyoaks
.) And I just can’t get enough of them all. And that may be all of tabloid journalism in a nutshell for you right there.

And so I write about them. That’s why I write about them. And now that I work for the most-read English-language newspaper in the world, and also the most notorious tabloid newspaper in Britain, what I write about them has an impact on their behaviour.

You know what that impact is? You wanna hear another secret? A secret about the world of tabloid journalism and celebrity?

For all the fuss we make about their bad behaviour, and for all the fuss they make about our reporting of their bad behaviour, all any of it does is makes their bad behaviour worse. That’s how it works. That’s the Faustian pact. That’s the hidden symbiosis of tabloid and celebrity. Bad behaviour shifts newspapers, and shifted newspapers make reputations. Nobody remembers the nice, quiet, sensible family men and women, do they? Nobody remembers the good blokes, the steady chaps.

And, believe me – anyone who wants to be a celebrity wants nothing more than to be remembered. For whatever reason they can get. Being remembered – that’s the point of it all. No matter what their publicists say.

It’s a perverse sort of logic, isn’t it? If I were to write in the
Globe
about the terrible service I get on your trains, for example, well, that would be seen as a bad thing within your company. The sort of thing you’d actively discourage me from doing. Normal people, normal companies, people like you and companies like yours – you don’t want to be remembered. Not by the popular press. Not if that’s what it costs. And quite right too.

Oh dear! Am I ranting, Martin? Do I rave? Am I beginning to sound like a tabloid monster? Like the worst, seediest kind of hack? Am I giving you the willies? Do excuse me. I’m just being honest.

Because that’s another thing about me (we’re going to find out so much about each other, Martin. We’re going to become such confidantes!) – I’m disgracefully honest.

I’ve built a career on it. Or rather, I’m building a career on it. Because, while I’m being honest and before you get too scared, I’m no big shot. I may write for the biggest and baddest paper in town, but I’m no kingmaker or king breaker. I’m not the Fake Sheikh. I’m just a reporter on the showbiz desk. I write what I’m told. And – contrary to popular belief and stereotype – I make sure everything I write is true.

My mate Harry the Dog says it’s going to be the downfall of me, my honesty. ‘Don’t be so bloody honest all the time,’ he says. ‘Don’t start forming your own opinions, just write what you’re told to think.’

His mate Rochelle (she’s the editor of the magazine supplement – it’s called
Amazeballs!
, I’m sure Mrs Harbottle is a fan) is even more perplexed by the idea.

‘Honesty? Totes yawnsville,’ she told me. ‘Like, seriously: whatevs.’

What about you, Martin? What do you think? Are you worried I’m going to write about you? About your trains? Is that why you wrote back to me? I can’t help wondering…

Tell you what, seeing as we’re here, why don’t you tell me about yourself? Do you love your job? Or do you grow frustrated? Do you sometimes feel like you’re no longer doing the things that fired up your passion for train management in the first place? Is being Managing Director of Premier Westward trains a bit like being headmaster of a very large and very complicated school? Are you one of those headmasters who first got into it because he wanted to teach, to feel the visceral thrill, the exhilarating responsibility of standing in front of a roomful of children and actually educating them… and now spends his days gazing at spreadsheets in an office by himself, balancing budgets and juggling timetables and stressing over staff quotas and never actually going anywhere near a classroom or interacting with any of the children except to send them home in disgrace?

Or do you love the power? Do you get off simply on being the man in charge? Do you prefer being the field marshal, safely miles behind the front, gazing at his models and blithely giving the orders?

Of course not. You’re the man of action! You’re there on the sharp end, helping out where you can. You told me that already.

Hey, guess what? Look at the time!
Tempus fugit
! Twenty-one of your minutes wasted. My work here is done… but I do look forward to you addressing my concerns. In fact, I can’t wait!

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 and 19.50 Premier Westward Railways trains between London Paddington and Oxford, June 3.

Dear Dan

Thank you for your emails concerning the delayed 07.31 and 19.50 of June 3. I do understand how frustrating being late for both your journeys must have been.

The problem in the morning was caused by a late-running earlier train in the Reading area which unfortunately had the effect of congesting many subsequent services, of which yours was one. The delay in the evening was due to faulty signalling in Southall. It is something we are continuing to address with Network Rail and I agree that it is simply not good enough.

On a personal note, I would like to assure you that as Managing Director I take all of our customers’ concerns very seriously – and not just those who work for ‘tabloid’ newspapers! But on that note, I would also like to stress that I consider this a private correspondence and would not expect any of it to appear in print.

I do hope that, even if you are unhappy with the service we are providing, I can assure you on a personal level that as Managing Director of Premier Westward, I am striving to do all I can to provide you with the best commuting experience I can.

Yours

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, June 8. Amount of my day wasted: five minutes.

Just a little one today, Martin. A small but perfectly formed five-minute delay. Pert – that’s the word. A pert little delay.

So small, so perfectly formed, so pert, in fact, that I’ve not even had time to finish my crossword today (confession: I love a crossword, me. I’m a sucker for a wordsearch. I’m all over a good game of Scrabble. My dad used to make them up for me, when I was a kid – meticulously tracing out the grids, shading in the dark spots with the retractable pencil he kept in his jacket pocket, carefully writing in the clues underneath and always including a space for ‘workings out’.)

Anyway. This isn’t one of my dad’s. This isn’t in his league, sadly. This is the morning ‘Commuter’s conundrum’ from my daily red-top. I’ve scanned it in for you and everything, Martin. See if you can finish what I’ve started.

Au revoir
!

Dan

Across:

1. Period 1811–20, beloved of Dandies

5. Internet journal

10. Lawful

11. Ideal

12. Melancholy

14. Number in Frodo’s fellowship

16. Cut

18. Keep in custody

20. Stuffy, uptight person

21. Take advance action

24. Dampened follicles (3,4)

25. Every little helps for this supermarket

27. Cricket exam

28. Mass-transit system

Down:

2. And so on

3. __ Nous – Between ourselves

4. Pick, select

6. Citrus-like herb

7. Impudence

8. Move nearer to target

9. Position

13. Improves through paint or wallpaper

15. Published issue

17. Indicator

19. Frugal home of Ancient Greeks

22. Sing the praises of

23. Fly-killing method

26. Large body of water

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
19.50 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, June 14. Amount of my day wasted: seven minutes.

Dear Martin

Seven minutes. ‘Oh come on!’ you’re thinking. ‘Give us a break! Cut us some slack! Seven minutes? What’s seven minutes?’

Seven minutes, Martin, is 420 seconds. It’s over one tenth of an hour. It’s a cigarette. It’s the first glass of wine after another long day. A lot can happen in seven minutes. A two-month-old baby girl promised a kiss from Daddy before she falls asleep could drift off kiss-less in those seven minutes.

Seven minutes can be an age, an eternity. It all depends on context. E, as I’m sure you don’t need reminding, totally equals mc squared.

Take the recent brouhaha in North Africa. All those protestors, stopped in their tracks, shot down, executed. The authorities there are saying it was self-defence, that the army was fired upon first, that they were reacting to a hostile situation. I’m hearing different in the newsroom. But the point is – it all happened in a few bare minutes.

In a few minutes – not even as many as seven – those 22 men went from just another bunch of chanting, protesting citizens uppity about some civil rights abuse or another to corpses. Bundles of rag and bone. Dead in the dust. Whether they were firing too, or whether they weren’t.

Seven minutes can change the world. And if I’m any kind of journalist at all, I reckon those few minutes in the heat and the madness and the dust and the sand are going to cost an awful lot more than just those 22 bodies.