Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (5 page)

You want to afford a comfortable, happy life? Fine: go get a job, work for a living. And the price of doing that is that your job will take up the majority of your time, your life, your happiness.

It’s a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, you’ve got the security, you can provide for your family, you can feed and clothe and shelter the ones you love. But it comes at the price of never really seeing them.

Or take marriage. That’s what we all want, isn’t it? The Cat Stevens ‘find a girl, settle down’ thing we talked about before? One true love: that’s what every poem, every pop song, every wish wished upon a star since the dawn of forever has been about. Find The One!

And what’s the price of finding The One? Real life with The One.

Real life with The One – and knowing there’ll never be another one. That’s a Pyrrhic victory. It’s a win that comes with prohibitively huge losses. Or if not losses, then at least a cost. A big old cost.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Beth. I’m in love with Beth. I reckon she really is The One. But we’ve been together seven years now and the realisation that there’ll never be another one is beginning to bite a bit.

Let’s say, for example, just hypothetically and all, there was a girl who gets on the same train as me every day, who always stands at the same place on the platform at the same time, who always makes for the same seat on the same carriage, just as I do. And let’s say, for example, just hypothetically, that that place and time on the platform and that seat and that carriage all happened to be right next to where I am every day. Let’s call her Train Girl, for want of a better name.

So: hypothetically, my instinct is to check her out, right? I mean, she’s actually pretty hot. If I were still in the market and on the lookout, I’d say she was definitely my type. She doesn’t look much like Beth (bobbed dark hair to Beth’s longish blonde locks, perhaps a little curvier to Beth’s dancer’s physique, a touch softer, more delicate around the eyes and nose compared with Beth’s sharper features) but she’s still my type.

If I was looking, I mean. If I was checking her out.

Which, of course, I’m not. Because I’m married, and the price, the cost, the Pyrrhic victory of marriage is that you’re no longer allowed to check people out. Just as the price, the cost, the Pyrrhic victory of checking out someone other than your wife could be your marriage itself. The consequences are too great. The whole situation’s too totally Pyrrhic for words.

Don’t get me wrong. Please don’t let me be misunderstood! I know it sounds like I want to cheat on my wife, but I don’t. I’m just trying to make a point. The price of victory is defeat – in all things. And besides: it’s nice to offload on you like this. I feel like if my train delays are going to have any upside to them, at least it might be that I can bore you with the workings of my mind without having to pay a shrink to listen to it all. You’re listening because you care about your customers, right? Right!

Oh, hang on! What’s the word count? Where are we at?

Ah. I’ve still got about six minutes to waste, I’m afraid. That’s the deal. So. What shall I say? How shall I fill the time?

I know!

Just to reassure you about my marital steadfastness and matrimonial happiness, I’ll tell you about how Beth and I met. Would you like to hear that? It’s a beautiful tale. It’s got everything. A real tear-jerker. An old-school romance. A bonkbuster!

We met eight years ago, in a bar in London’s fashionable Central London. I was technically unemployed at the time, writing for a couple of music magazines for cash in hand (when they had some) and signing on to Her Majesty’s Dole. I’d not been long out of university, you see: I was still finding my feet in the grown-up world.

Beth was still studying. She had just started her nursing degree, and was sufficiently young, naive and drunk enough to be impressed by my patter. We were introduced by mutual friends: my mate Trev and her friend Claire were seeing each other, and were at that slightly embarrassing stage in their relationship when they want all their friends to become friends with all their other half’s friends.

So there we were. Both slightly the worse for wear, in one of those bars where the barmen pretend they’re somehow better than the people they’re serving – and from the moment we were introduced to the moment we were finally kicked out of the place long after everyone else had left, we didn’t talk to anyone but each other.

I won’t lie: she was the hottest girl I’d ever met. (And let’s not forget, I’m on first name terms with most of the
Hollyoaks
cast.) A few years younger than me, a million times better looking than me, at least as funny and certainly as clever as me… I was properly smitten. She did this thing when she listened to me: her eyes widened. Her pupils actually dilated. You have no idea how much of a turn-on that is.

So, anyway, for the rest of the night, until the chairs were stacked on tables and the glasses were taken away and the uppity bar staff finally lost their tempers and turfed us onto the street, we didn’t talk to anyone but each other.

And then… she went back to her place, and I went back to mine. Without so much as a kiss. She went back to her place, and her boyfriend, and I went back to mine, and my girlfriend.

Oh yeah: I had a girlfriend. Surprised? I already told you: I’m not the cheating kind. And evidently, neither was she. Nothing happened that night – nor the next time we saw each other, a few weeks later at Trev’s birthday party… except that we talked and talked to each other again all night, and at the end of the night swapped email addresses.

Nothing happened that night or any other night, for a whole year.

But throughout that year, we must have exchanged over 200 emails. Two a week, each, at least. Throughout that year, I must have told Beth more about myself than I’d told my actual girlfriend. Throughout that year, we didn’t even meet again. (Trev and Claire split up soon after his birthday. He lacked ambition, apparently. She lacked a willingness to perform certain acts Trev had read about in
FHM
. It was never going to work.)

And then, almost exactly a year after we first met, we met again. I was selling stuff to the nationals by then (and consequently no longer signing on); she was still studying. We were outside another one of those stupid trendy bars in Clerkenwell. We bumped into each other in the taxi queue. Literally. I was drunk and laughing. She was drunk and crying. She’d just split up with her boyfriend.

I’d been single for a month by then. She got into my taxi. And I’ve never looked at another girl since. (Well, OK, I suppose I have looked at Train Girl, but you know what I mean. I’ve never
looked
at another girl since.)

Oh dear, Martin. Are you OK? Are you crying? Don’t worry! It’s OK to cry! I know, I know, it’s a beautiful story. But aren’t they all, in the beginning? Isn’t every story beautiful when it starts? It’s what happens next that really matters.

Anyway! Time has caught us. Until the next delay…

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, June 23.

Dear Dan

Thank you for your email. Our 07.31 yesterday morning was eight minutes late arriving into Oxford after we were held up by rail enthusiasts in Banbury taking pictures of a steam train from beyond the safe part of the platform. This subsequently set us running behind another train, where we incurred an additional ten-minute delay.

Yours sincerely

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, June 28. Amount of my day wasted: three minutes. Fellow sufferers: Train Girl, Lego Head, Universal Grandpa, Guilty New Mum, Competitive Tech Nerds.

Dear Martin

Ooh, it’s another small one. They all add up though, right? Like drips in the desert slowly gouging the Grand Canyon, they all add up. The only question is: how shall I waste your time accordingly?

Perhaps by sharing how I spent my wasted time this morning…

Martin: I made a playlist. A mixtape, as those of us who remember
Top of the Pops
might say. I used to make playlists for Beth when we first started going out – a carefully crafted selection of songs that spoke about us, about how I felt about her. I’d spend ages on them, agonising over exactly the order the songs should go in. I’ve no idea where they are now. I’ve no idea if she’s even kept them, to be honest.

Well, today I’ve made a mixtape for you. I took all the stations on the local stopping service between Oxford and London Paddington and I put them to music.

And you know what? It wouldn’t be a bad album. Perhaps it’s something you should look into?

‘
Oxford
Comma’ – Vampire Weekend

‘Truly
Radley
Deeply’ – Soundgarden

‘Didcot Parkway
life’ – Blur

‘I Don’t Want to Go to
Cholsey’
– Elvis Costello

‘Goring & Streatley
Underground’ – The Jam

‘Pangbourne
in the USA’ – Bruce Springsteen

‘Tilehurst
Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ – Rolf Harris

‘Red
Reading
Wine’ – Neil Diamond

‘Twyford
a Little Tenderness’ – Otis Redding

Anything by Iron
Maidenhead

‘Slough
Deep is Your Love?’ – The Bee Gees

‘Shang-A-
Langley’
– The Bay City Rollers

‘Iver
Had the Time of My Life’ – Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes

‘West Drayton
End Girls’ – Pet Shop Boys

‘Hayes
& Harlington
You, The Rock Steady Crew’ – Rock Steady Crew

‘It Never Rains in
Southall
California’ – Albert Hammond

‘Sexual
Ealing Broadway’
– Marvin Gaye

‘Paddington
Dogs and Englishmen’ – Noel Coward

Think of the franchising opportunities, Martin! I want ten percent of everything…

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
21.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, June 30. Amount of my day wasted: 11 minutes. Fellow sufferers: none that I recognised.

Dear Martin

Have you seen the news today? Oh boy! It’s all happening, isn’t it? Home and away.

The situation, as they like to say on the BBC, is worsening. Things have become grave. It’s getting real. I did wonder how long it would take for it all to kick off properly, over there in North Africa. I did wonder how long it would take before the authorities stopped surreptitiously taking out a few supposed ‘terrorists’ and just started shooting willy-nilly. I did wonder how long it would be before they stopped pretending to be the good guys and opted instead for old-school horror tactics. That’s proper shock and awe. You wanna protest? Fine. BAM BAM BAM. You’re dead. And dead men don’t protest.

I did wonder how long it would take before the killing began in earnest. You just can’t have the squares of your capital filled with people waving flags – not if you’re a proper dictator. It’s embarrassing, apart from anything else. And so I did wonder how long it would take before it all went a bit horrible.

We all wondered, in the
Globe
newsroom. We had a book running on it, in fact. If only they could have held off another week I’d have made about 200 quid. As it was, my mate Harry the Dog, who also just happens to be deputy foreign editor, scooped the lot. Typical. Another reason not to trust tinpot regimes, eh?

Do you want to know why we call him Harry the Dog? There are a few theories floating around – that his nickname came from the notorious Millwall football hooligan of the same name, that it came from rhyming slang (he’s always on the dog and bone), that it came because once he gets his teeth into a story he refuses to let go…

And the answer is: none of the above. Harry the Dog got his nickname from the children’s story. The story of the little dog that got so dirty his owners didn’t recognise him any more. That’s our Harry. Brought up as Harold by very well-to-do parents, sent to the very best schools, easy possessor of a first-class degree from yer actual Oxford University, tall, blond, louchely handsome, destined for great things, headed for a stellar career in politics, economics… and spurner of all of the above in favour of hacking along at the country’s dirtiest, most notorious Sunday newspaper. Harry: drinker, smoker, gambler, shagger, tabloid journalist. Harry: now all-but-disowned by a family who only wanted the best for him. Harry: the dog that got so dirty his parents didn’t recognise him any more.

He’s a brilliant bloke – in both senses of the word. Brilliant in that he’s a genius; but also, he’s a brilliant bloke. My best mate and ally against the daily madness of our boss. And now two-ton richer.

Anyway. What was I saying? Oh yes, it’s bad out there. What with the indiscriminate killing of peaceful protesters and all. But it’s bad in here too. It’s looking very bad! That half-wit Scottish crooner, the one with the famously bewigged hair and the refreshingly down-to-earth girlfriend (the same ‘refreshingly down-to-earth’ girlfriend he’s been cheating on, by the way, regularly, methodically, blatantly, outrageously, with every starry-eyed casting-couch candidate or ingenuous young media wannabe he can get his manicured hands on) – he’s definitely taking us to court, it seems.

(He’s not taking
us
to court, Martin. He’s got no beef with you and me. He’s fine with us. We’re cool, in his book. We’re gravy.)