Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time

by Dominic Utton

  Merry Christmas, Martin. I hope you got everything you wished for. I hope all your dreams came true. I hope the baby Jesus came down your chimney and filled all your sacks with holy spirits. I hope you had a good one.

  How was my Christmas? Well, I’m back at work, so technically it was only two days long, but nevertheless, that was long enough. We ate, we drank, we made merry hell. How was Christmas in my household, mine and Beth’s first Christmas with baby Sylvie? Pretty awful, actually, since you ask.

  On Christmas morning, as we all three woke in the same bed – little Sylvie stretched diagonally between us, arms above her head and legs bent wide, as if to maximise the distance, as if to keep us as far apart from each other as possible – on Christmas morning, as we opened our eyes to the wails and demands of another day; on Christmas morning, as we parted the curtains and gazed at the grey drizzle, the freezing fog, as we trudged downstairs to our little tree and its little huddle of presents (all for Sylvie, of course, bar two little ones at the back. As is traditional, we both broke our pact not to buy each other presents), on Christmas morning, Beth and I had the biggest argument of our marriage. Of our whole relationship.

  I mean, there’ve been some whoppers lately, some doozies, some proper stand-up screamers, but this beat the lot. It knocked them into a cocked Santa hat. And we haven’t spoken since. Presents: silence. Turkey dinner: silence. Afternoon Bond film: silence. God bless us, every one.

  What was the argument about? What do you think? The argument was about Mr Blair. It was about Beth and Mr Blair. It was about whether there is a Beth and Mr Blair. I finally decided that, without actual evidence of any wrongdoing, I’d go for the full confession. Ask her straight. Get it all out in the open, once and for all.

  So that’s just what I did. I came right out with it, as Sylvie crawled in and out of the cardboard boxes and across the wrapping paper and ignored the presents they’d recently contained. ‘Beth,’ I said, looking her straight in the eye. ‘Are you having an affair?’

  What do you think she said, Martin? Yes? Yes, Dan, I’m having an affair. I’ve been seeing someone else. It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve made a terrible mistake. Please forgive me?

  She didn’t say that. She told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was a terrible person for even asking. She told me she was horrified I even thought so. She burst into tears and then she slapped me and then she turned away and wouldn’t let me near her. She said she was disgusted with me for thinking that way. She said she felt betrayed I even asked her. She shouted and she yelled and she screamed that I was a shocking excuse for a husband for daring to harbour such thoughts. She went on for ages. Until the wailing of Sylvie got to be louder than she was. And then… the silence. And she’s not spoken since.

  But you know what, Martin? Amidst all that shouting, all that shock and outrage and disappointment she expressed, she didn’t actually answer the question. She didn’t deny it. My wife did not tell me whether or not she’s having an affair with Mr Blair.

  And so we haven’t spoken since. We spent the rest of Christmas with the baby between us, Beth sobbing, me cold. And as the two of them went to bed early, I kept sitting there, silent in front of the TV, drinking, thinking.

  And meanwhile, on the box, Europe rose up in protest. Europe was outraged. Europe couldn’t believe this stuff. In Rome and Madrid and Paris and Amsterdam, once again, they’re up in arms. They’re furious about the lack of action in North Africa, they’re outraged by the inability of the West to do something about it all, to act in the face of such hideous behaviour. ‘Betrayal’ said the banners. ‘Shame’.

  And watching them, I wished I could get a banner and go marching myself. I wished I could kick up a storm too. Betrayal. Shame.

  Au revoir!

  Dan

  ‌Letter 58

  From: DantheMan020@gmail.com

  To: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com

  Re: 22.50 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, January 4. Amount of my day wasted: 20 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Fuck knows.

  Martin. She was lying. She adtmitted it. She told me on New YEar Day, after one whole week of dead ssilence. She was lyinghf.

  It only happened once. On that baby-bonding weekemnd. It was a mistake. She regretted it immediately. She loves me still. Even thouggh. Despite. She still ca’nt believe it. She still can’t beleive it happened. She still can’t believe she evber did it.

  She wants me to forgive her. Can I forgive her? She’s a lair, Martin. She’s a liar. I’m so drunk I can barely see the screen, but I know that much. Sgjhhe’s a liar.

  Au revoir

  Dan

  PS – Ohhhh my trains 20 minute delayed but loike I said I cant see teh screen

  properly. Ill owe you, ok> Ther’es a pal. I’lll owe you one.

  From: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com

  To: DantheMan020@gmail.com

  Re: 22.50 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, January 4.

  Dear Dan

  I am sorry you have once again had to write to me. Over the Christmas period many trains are subject to revised timetables due to essential engineering work, and it seems that your service on December 28 was the victim of some over-running engineering work around the Reading area. On the evening of January 4 there was a problem with a malfunctioning heater unit in the driver’s cab and the train was unable to leave Paddington until an engineer could be called to stabilise the thermostat.

  I am also sorry to hear that your trip to Torquay was marred slightly by problems on the network. Unfortunately trains do on occasion fail. Another ‘act of God’ if you like! I am afraid, however, that the conditions of your complimentary tickets do mean that I am unable to reimburse or recompense you in any way for the inconvenience.

  On a personal note, I would like to express just how sorry I am about your situation at home. But please, do not give up on your marriage too easily. Think of your daughter. Think of what might happen to her without you. I am sure that with some work on both your parts this is something you can overcome together, for the good of little Sylvie. It has to be worth a try, surely.

  With warmest regards

  Martin

  ‌Letter 59

  From: DantheMan020@gmail.com

  To: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com

  Re: 22.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, January 6. Amount of my day wasted: nine minutes. Fellow sufferer: Overkeen Estate Agent.

  All right, I’ll start with the good news. I’m drunk again. (Not too drunk. Not too drunk to at least run a spellcheck this time. But drunk nonetheless. Filled with booze! Replete with liquor! Stuffed to the gills with alcohol! Oh sweet, sweet beer, as Homer Simpson so poetically expressed it; cause of and solution to all of life’s problems!)

  OK? Happy? Good. That’s the glad tidings done and dusted, the happy stuff out of the way. Now let’s get on with real life.

  Real life, in the real world, isn’t going so well. Real life, full of questions and answers that can’t be asked or found at the bottom of the glass, kind of stinks. Home’s rubbish; work’s gone fully fledged mental. Chicken oriental.

  Oh, Martin. I wish I hadn’t written that now. Chicken oriental, I mean. It’s gone and made me hungry. I’d kill for some chicken right now. Some Chinese chicken. I’d murder for some. That’s the problem with drinking on an empty stomach: your stomach stays empty. You try to fill it up with booze – God knows I’ve tried! – and it just stays empty. And then you get to Paddington and there’s no time to get a Burger King and you get on the train and there’s no buffet car and you get home and there’s no chips in the freezer and besides by that time the headache’s kicked in and all you want to do is sleep. And you wake up even hungrier. Oh, Martin: what I wouldn’t do for some chicken oriental right now! Sweet, sweet chicken oriental!

  Sorry? What was I saying? Oh yes: home – rubbish. My wife, in case you didn’t get the mess
age last time around, slept with Mr Blair. She cheated on me. She betrayed me. She played away. She gave it up and gave it out and made a mockery of everything I thought we were.

  So, you know, home – rubbish. Toilet, in fact. Home: toilet. And that’s all I’m going to say about it. Toilet.

  Work – mental. Chicken oriental (oh God, I’ve done it again. I’m so hungry, Martin! So hungry!)

  Do you want to know what happened at work today? Shall I tell you? OK. Here’s what happened at work today. The police came round again. At first we were all like, all right officer, you again is it, let yourself in, you know your way around, what’s it this time… until we realised they looked a bit more serious than the last couple of visits. This time they didn’t do any of that standing around awkwardly stuff they usually do. This time they looked purposeful.

  And their purpose? It didn’t take long to find out. A pair of them marched up to the showbiz editor’s desk. Even as he looked up from the seven mobile phones he was furiously texting between (and they were lucky to catch him here, in truth: he’s never in the office, the showbiz ed, he’s always out wining or dining, schmoozing or boozing, glad-handing or back-scratching. He doesn’t do any of the actual writing in his column, he just phones in the facts and gets the rest of us to file it. His job, as actual showbiz editor, involves no editing and all showbiz. His job is to live the life and our job is to repeat the resultant anecdotal evidence), he looked up from his phalanx of phones and just managed to get out a ‘What the f—’ before they arrested him.

  They only arrested the showbiz ed, Martin! In broad daylight! On a Friday morning! With handcuffs and everything! They only went and read him his rights and confiscated his phones and took him away for questioning and that! And even as Goebbels came barrelling out of his office shouting blue murder and they kept walking him out of the door with his arms behind his back, we all just sat there and gawped. The most cynical, the smartest, the most embattled hacks on Fleet Street, collectively gobsmacked.

  So: first the features editor (he was never charged, you’ll remember, they were just content to throw the mud, sully his reputation, make him all-but unemployable and then hang him out to dry) and now the showbiz ed.

  He has been charged, however. They’ve charged him with the illegal accessing of private information. They’re saying he’s been listening in where he shouldn’t, reading what he’s not allowed to. They’re saying that some of those stories of his were not the result of good honest journalism.

  And you know what the strangest thing of all is? After we watched the Old Bill lead him out of the office (arms behind his back, officer at each shoulder, just like you see on the telly) we all turned to the telly. And watched them emerge from our building again. We watched them walk out into the scrum of reporters, the bank of cameras, the stroboscopic glare of the flashbulbs, pause, and give a statement.

  And that’s the moment Goebbels lost the plot completely.

  They wouldn’t tell us why he was being arrested, but they would tell every other news organisation on the planet? And do so outside our own offices? It’s taking the mickey, Martin. It’s properly having a laugh at us. He picked up a stapler, drew his arm back, and launched it at the screen. And now there’s one less TV in the office too.

  So what did we do? We went to the pub. I got drunk with Harry the Dog and Bombshell and the Wee Tim’rous Trainee, who’s turning into a bit of a star, as it happens, but more of that later. What else are we going to do? Tomorrow’s going to be a horror show… but today we went to the pub.

  Au revoir!

  Dan

  ‌Letter 60

  From: DantheMan020@gmail.com

  To: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com

  Re: 22.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, January 10. Amount of my day wasted: eight minutes. Fellow sufferer: Overkeen Estate Agent.

  Dear Martin

  Beth and I haven’t spoken a word since she admitted sleeping with Mr Blair. Don’t get me wrong: she’s spoken. I just haven’t spoken back to her. But yes, she’s spoken all right. She’s spoken, and shouted, and pleaded, and sobbed, and shouted again. She started off by telling me it was a mistake (well, durr), that she regrets it with all her heart, that she was a bit drunk and a bit overemotional and he was just kind of there and it just kind of happened and immediately afterwards she ran away back to her own room in tears…

  And I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing. So she started crying. She’s been crying since the weekend, in fact.

  And am I happy about it? No. Am I happy I found out what happened? Yes. Better that than not know, right? Better to live with the awful truth than with the blissful lie. Right? Right? Better the Pyrrhic victory than the ongoing humiliation of ignorant defeat. Right?

  Or am I wrong? Or should I stop with this whole right or wrong business, with always insisting that everything has to either be right or wrong, black or white, and acknowledge the grey areas, admit things sometimes aren’t as simple as newspaper sub-editors and headline writers like to pretend they are?

  The only problem is, I don’t know how to do it. I’m like Overkeen Estate Agent here, in the shiny suit and tie in fat footballer’s knot, shouting clichés into my phone. Trying to ‘push things forward’, trying to ‘be first to the endgame’ without a clue as to how to do it.

  I’ve no idea what happens next. I’ve no clue as to where we go now. Where do we go, Beth and Sylvie and I? Now the evening is spread out against the sky…

  Hey! I’ll tell you what, Martin! I’ll tell you something to cheer us both up. To give us both a hollow laugh. Goebbels: he’s going mad. My boss, the man I look to every day for professional guidance, the man with the power to make or break careers… he’s losing it. I mean, he’s always been unhinged, he’s always been on the edge – but now he’s definitely fallen off the edge. He’s strayed from the path. He’s got off the boat. Never get off the boat, Martin!

  You know how I know he’s got off the boat? He’s only gone and offered me the showbiz editor’s job, that’s how. The poor guy’s barely been given bail and already Goebbels has taken me aside, sat me down, looked me in the eye and told me he needs me to be showbiz editor of the Globe.

  (Oh, did I say he’d ‘offered’ me the job? Apologies. Not strictly true. He didn’t offer me the job at all. He told me the job was mine. In much the same way you might tell someone their shoelace is undone. ‘I need a showbiz editor today,’ he said, ‘and you’re the best man for the job. Congratulations etc. I can’t pay you more until this whole nonsense blows over, and you can’t move desk because everything in his bit of the office has been sealed off by the police, and I can’t actually announce it or anything as that might look a bit heartless, but for all intents and purposes, you’re showbiz editor of this paper now. Once all this is over we’ll make it official. Now go get me some stories.’)

  So there we are. Showbiz ed! Looks like my career really has taken off. Showbiz editor of the most-read English-language newspaper on the planet… at a time when we’re being taken to court on the one hand over our showbiz reporting, and investigated by the police on the other over all our other reporting. Showbiz ed of the Globe… just as MPs and fellow journalists are calling for our muzzling. Pyrrhic, Martin! It’s too Pyrrhic!

  Au revoir!

  Dan

  ‌Letter 61

  From: DantheMan020@gmail.com

  To: Martin.Harbottle@premier-westward.com

  Re: 07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, January 14. Amount of my day wasted: five minutes. Fellow sufferers: no regulars (Saturday, innit).

  The kids are revolting, Martin! They want a riot of their own! All last night they were out, smashing seven shades out of the Seven Sisters Road, firing up Finsbury Park and tearing down south Tottenham. Wasn’t it extraordinary? Christ, I love a good riot. Nothing like a good riot for filling a newspaper!

  (Don’t get me wrong, Martin. I’m not
a fan of riots per se – I disagree in principle with the principle of civil unrest, of course: arson and looting and vandalism are all thoroughly bad things and to be wholeheartedly condemned… but in this instance, at this time, this riot is a godsend.)

  Yesterday morning we had nothing to put in the paper. Nothing worthy of our paper, anyway. No big hits at all. And then, as the freezing cold dusk drew in on another January afternoon, some stupid (white) copper happened to thump some hapless (black) street-corner hash-peddler a little too hard (we’re hearing it wasn’t even real hash he was selling, Martin; we’re hearing it was melted and refrozen chocolate), he happened to do it in full view of all the kid’s mates, without any back-up, and then made the whole situation worse by attempting to calm things down by standing on the boy as he tried to get up again. He actually stood on him, Martin!

  Well, the rest was inevitable. A thrown brick, and then another, the cop chased down the road, the kids suddenly drunk on the power they had (they chased an actual policeman off their manor!), one shop window stoved in, then another, and another, a fire lit, a few phone calls made, texts sent, BBMs back and forth… and before the moon was fully up all the way through to dawn, the whole borough in flames.

  I’m hearing they plan to kick it all off again today, Martin. Pick up where they left off. I’m hearing the boys from the neighbouring boroughs fancy a bit of the action too. What I’m hearing is that today’s going to be worse than yesterday, that tonight’s going to make last night look like a tea party.

  I can’t even imagine what Goebbels is going to be like today. Kid in a sweet shop. It wouldn’t surprise me if he got out there with a meths-filled milk bottle and a broken brick himself, just to make sure the story had enough legs to last till Sunday’s paper.