Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (13 page)

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
17.21 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, September 6.

Dear Dan

I’m sorry to hear of your latest delay. Seven minutes is unacceptable and we shall endeavour to do better in future. The problem on this occasion was a faulty signal box in the Taplow area. I have been on to Network Rail about infrastructure maintenance several times already this week, but rest assured I shall bring the matter up again with them as a matter of urgency.

Once again, please accept my most sincere apologies for the time this delay took out of your evening.

Best

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, September 8. Amount of my day wasted: 11 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Guilty New Mum, Lego Head, Universal Grandpa, Competitive Tech Nerds.

Thanks for your letters, Martin. Most informative. But… that’s all they are. Did you not read what happened on Tuesday? We were raided. By the police. A man was arrested. Our computers were examined. Some plod probably scanned all my emails. (He wouldn’t have scanned these emails, of course: these all come from a separate computer, an independent laptop, through an entirely non-work-related webmail address. I’m not completely stupid, you know.)

Are you not interested at all? Are you not appalled? Aghast? Martin, I thought you’d be as outraged as I am – or if not that then at least sympathetic. Do you think I seriously give a damn about faulty signal boxes in the Taplow area? Democracy is under threat here! The enshrined right of a free press is being torn up, and your reaction is to blather on about signal boxes?

I despair.

Look up, Martin. Look about. Raise your head and gaze out of the window and check out what’s happening – out there, outside the train, on the other side of the tracks, beyond the sidings, in the real world. Get out of your seat, Martin, get out of the train, and step into reality.

The world: it’s screwed. It’s falling apart. The centre cannot hold. The North African revolution is stalled and stuttered and suffocating under shellfire, and after those two Médecins Sans Frontières guys disappeared last week, even the aid agencies have all scarpered.

Greece and Spain are still revolting; now Paris and Amsterdam are looking to go the same way. The French students are back on the streets, marching through the Marais on the way to the Bastille; expect them to be joined by the farmers and the fishermen before too long. Maybe even the railway workers. Can you imagine that, Martin? Railway workers downing tools and making a point about the world?

And what are we doing? We’re doing nothing. We are not doers at all. We’re wasting time, Martin – and it’s only a matter of time before time doth waste us in return.

Oh, you know what? Forget it. The train this morning was 11 minutes late, but I just can’t face writing a letter that long to you this morning. It was 11 minutes late. And, I’ll be honest with you (as ever), without Train Girl on, it felt a lot longer.

(She’s ill: she texted me – did I not mention we’re texting now? We swapped numbers on our night out last week. Don’t read too much into it or anything, I’ve got hundreds of numbers on my phone, and, you know, seeing as we’re friends now it seemed silly not to swap numbers. So we’re texting. She texted me this morning. She said she was ill. Something she ate, apparently. She also said how shocked she was by the events of Tuesday morning. She said it was a disgrace and a scandal and she hoped I was OK, and if I wanted to talk about it or go for another drink or anything, just shout. Like I say: she’s a friend. She gets it, Martin.)

And what were the rest of them doing this morning, as the world falls apart?

Guilty New Mum was in a flap about nursery schools (‘All I’m saying is we need to be thinking about it now,’ she whispered into the phone, loud enough for most of the carriage to hear. ‘It doesn’t make us pushy parents. I only want what’s best for her. Of course I won’t ask that. I can’t ask that. You know how it works. I’ve only just come back and I can’t go round trying to call in favours off the likes of him, for crying out loud.’) The Competitive Tech Nerds were getting all Alpha Male about Smart TVs (‘Motion capture remote control IS the future.’ ‘Nonsense, motion capture was over before it began. It’s the next Betamax, the next Blu-Ray, the next HDTV.’ ‘Are you comparing Betamax with HDTV?’ ‘Absolutely! HD has gone the way of the dodo, my friend. HD is yesterday…’ and so on,
ad infinitum
.)

Universal Grandpa was chuckling over something in his
Telegraph
crossword – though only after our now customary wink on the platform, as one of us holds open the train door for the other – and, in the midst of it all but somehow totally separate from it all, Lego Head sat perfectly still, doing his daily nirvana thing.

And I looked at them and of them all, it seemed only Lego Head was anything like close to getting it. Of them all, with their worries and pointless arguments and half-a-century (or whatever) of the same commute, the same paper, the same crossword, only he was opting out. Lego Head: the Buddha of the morning commute.

So anyway. My train this morning was 11 minutes late – but I’m just not in the mood for wasting that much of your time today. I’ll owe it you. I’ll put it on the slate. I’ll make it up to you next time, OK?

And in the meantime: seriously, Martin. Open your eyes.

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, September 8.

Dear Dan

Thank you for your letter of September 8. I am sorry you feel my responses are lacking something. I am endeavouring to always explain the reasons for your delays in each of my responses to your complaints. It may interest you that, as on September 6, the continuing signalling problems at Taplow were once again responsible for the slow running of your service.

On other matters, I was of course sorry to hear of the events of Tuesday in your office. I am sure, however, that the authorities acted with due diligence and that if there is a suspicion of illegality then no one – not even the country’s best-selling newspaper! – should be considered above the law.

On a personal note, I am glad to hear again that your journeys with Premier Westward are made more enjoyable thanks to your friendship with ‘Train Girl’. And do you really have hundreds of numbers in your mobile phone? I think I must have no more than a dozen! And the only texts I ever receive seem to be from my mobile service provider offering ‘sim updates’!

Warm regards

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
20.50 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, September 14. Amount of my day wasted: 12 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Sauron Flesh Harrower.

Dear Martin

Tally ho! Look smart, old boy! Best blazer and tie on, shoes polished, buttons buffed and hair properly combed! It’s rugger time! The Rugby World Cup starts tomorrow, and I can only imagine the near-hyperactive levels of excitement in the Harbottle household.

It’s your thing, isn’t it? Rugger, I mean. You don’t consider it to be a bunch of public schoolboys prancing about in the mud, all repressed homoeroticism and hearty elitism and fat, posh bullying at all, do you? Of course not. Why should you? We built an empire on that game. (And we possibly lost it for the same reasons.) I bet old Isambard Kingdom saw the value in rugby. I bet he’d have taken some time out from creating the Great Western Railway in order to cheer our boys on against the might of Tonga and Western Samoa. As I’m sure you will too.

Thanks for your letter. And apologies if the tone of my last to you was a little… terse. I’ve been under a lot of pressure, as they say. Things have been getting on top of me, at home and away. Your seeming inability to do what I’m paying you so handsomely to do (get me between Oxford and London on time) is just another straw bending the camel’s toe. (That is the phrase, isn’t it? Or am I thinking of something else entirely?)

At least there’s been no further news at work. No further incidents. All’s quiet on that front. Though of course the court case starts next week. The fellatious warbler and his fallacious accusations – he’s getting his trial and it’s going to be dynamite all right. He’ll have his say. But the real question is: will we have ours? How far is the paper prepared to go in its own defence?

At home… well, things at home ain’t what they used to be. There’s trouble in paradise. Beth’s getting better, getting less depressed – and that’s good at least. She’s starting to feel like a person again, as opposed to a baby-slave, a martyr to nappies and feeding time and teething troubles.

(Oh, did I not mention – Sylvie’s started teething. Just as she showed signs of occasionally wanting to sleep at night, she’s got a little tooth or two coming through. And it’s giving her no end of grief. Dribbling, drizzling, screaming grief. Sodden sheets and blood on her bib. All this anguish over a few teeth, and it’s not like they’re even going to last the decade. These same teeth that are causing little Sylvie so much pain – they’re all going to fall out again and get replaced by new ones. I mean, really. Is someone taking the mickey here?)

Where was I? Oh yes. Beth’s starting to feel like a person again. A woman, even. But it’s nothing to do with me, guv. It’s her new social circle that’s responsible: the mums and the dads and their shared responsibilities and experiences. The baby mafia. Me? I’m just the bloke she hands over to at home. The one she married.

And now I’m in the bad books still further. There is a weekend happening, apparently. A baby-bonding weekend, at the end of this month, organised by the NCT – twelve babies and their parents in a Travelodge near Milton Keynes for three days and two nights, learning how to grow and develop and share and relate and sympathise and empathise and all that other jazz. It turns out it’s been on our calendar for a while now, it’s been booked and paid for for weeks.

Except, here’s the thing. I never look at the calendar. I can’t remember ever being told about this weekend away. And, given the state of war at work at the moment, there’s no way I can get a Friday and a Saturday off to go and sit in a room full of depressed women learning about baby sign language. There’s no chance, I told Beth. I’m really, truly sorry – but it just isn’t going to happen. It’s not my fault. Be reasonable.

Between you and me, Martin, I don’t think I should have told her to be reasonable. In my experience, telling someone to be reasonable almost always incites them into direct unreasonable behaviour. Cue a lot of tears and slammed doors and accusations. And I just had to stand there and take it while she screamed at me, Sylvie gently dribbling watery blood on to my shoulder.

So, yes. Things, as I say, ain’t what they used to be.

How do things get like this, Martin? How can it be that something like Sylvie – Sylvie, who, we agree, is the most beautiful, extraordinary, heart-stoppingly perfect embodiment of what Beth and I mean to each other; Sylvie, a living apotheosis of love – how can it be that it’s Sylvie who’s the driving cause of all this awfulness between us?

We never used to argue. You want an anecdote? I’ve not told you an anecdote for a while, have I, Martin? OK, here goes.

When Beth and I had been officially dating about six months, we went on holiday together. It’s a big deal, your first holiday with a new girlfriend, it’s a dry run for living together. It’s when you first find out all those odd little quirks and habits that seem amusing or endearing in isolation are actually not that cute, not that adorable after all. It’s when you have your first proper argument.

So, there we were, Beth and I, young and clever and newly in love, on a budget flight to Crete. And we’re talking about how we never argue, as you do when you’re young and clever and in love and the only thing you ever talk about is yourselves and how young, clever and in love you are… and Beth makes me a bet.

She bets me £20 I can’t manage two days without arguing with her. I argue with everyone else, she points out; there’s no way that I’ll manage 48 hours of non-stop, inescapable proximity to anyone – even her – without sniping about something.

Nonsense, I say. I’m young and in love… and besides, I don’t argue with everyone. Only idiots. So I up the bet – a further £5 for every subsequent 24 hours we go without arguing.

It took about seven months until the bet was finally settled. By that time she owed me about 1,100 quid. (Oh, and the argument, for the record, was over the official recommendations for units of alcohol one should consume per week. She said they were set in stone. I said that, on the contrary, they were completely made up, plucked out of thin air, they were medically entirely unproven. So I actually won that argument as well.)

Anyway, the point is, we never argued. And now… it’s all we do. It can’t just be Sylvie, can it? That wouldn’t make sense at all.

And you know what the other point is? We need that holiday. We need to go on holiday again. We need a weekend away, together. Just not a baby-bonding weekend, that’s all. Or not this particular baby-bonding weekend.

Oh, and while we’re at it: 12 minutes today, Martin – that’s how much of my life you’ve taken from me this Wednesday. Twelve minutes spent on your train that should have been spent at home. And after I let you off three or four minutes the other day too! Shame, Martin. Shame on you.

Au revoir
!

Dan