Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time Read Online Free

of Ancient Greeks
    22. Sing the praises of
    23. Fly-killing method
    26. Large body of water
‌ Letter 5
    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.
    Oh, Martin! Look at us. We’re getting far too serious. We need to calm down. We need to remember what we’re here for. We don’t want to hear about murder and mayhem in the squares of North Africa! Such talk can only bring us down.
    Have you ever been on the radio, Martin? I have. And let me tell you, seven minutes on the radio can feel like an awfully long time. When you’re on live radio, seven minutes can feel like all the time in the world.
    So there I was, about six years ago, brought in to the studio to grace the airwaves with my insight and analysis on the new Oasis album. All of London was listening. The nation’s capital city was agog! What would I, self-styled voice of the nation’s youth (and at that time contributing rock and pop reviewer for the Sunday Express ) have to tell this great city about les frères Gallaghers’ latest? What would we all learn about the state of British rock?
    London paused. London cocked an ear.
    And I… blew it. I floundered. Early on in my allotted seven minutes, whilst trying to express my frustration with Noel’s bandwagon-jumping critics, I jumbled up the phrases ‘gets my goat’ and ‘I have a beef with’ (I have no idea why those two phrases were in my mind to begin with) and I loudly declared: ‘That really gets my beef.’
    There was a terrible pause. And then I said it again. And then for seven minutes I couldn’t think of anything else to say. All I could think was: ‘What the hell does “gets my beef” mean? Why did I say that? What kind of idiot am I anyway? Gets my beef? Gets my beef ?’
    Martin, it was awful. It was seven minutes of abject misery. And it felt like an awful lot longer.
    So please, don’t tell me seven minutes doesn’t really matter. It does. They do. Time is relative. Whether it’s 22 men lying broken in the dust or one man making a prat of himself on the radio: seven minutes can feel like for ever.
    Oh, and as I write, on a train in the morning (the morning following the delay I write of today. Did I mention time is relative?), inching past the golden suburbs of Reading, I see we’re already eight or so minutes behind schedule again. Expect another letter later today. And if you thought that being