Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time Read Online Free Page A

seven minutes late got my beef… baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
    Au revoir !
    Dan
‌ Letter 6
    From: [email protected]
    To: [email protected]
    Re: 07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, June 15. Amount of my day wasted: 17 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Guilty New Mum, Competitive Tech Nerds, Universal Grandpa, Lego Head, Train Girl.
    How goes the war, Martin? Bad guys still winning? Hang in there, soldier. The sun also rises. Dreams never end. It’s Glastonbury next weekend! That’s something good, right? That’s something to look forward to. Assuming it stops raining, of course.
    So chin up, private. Eyes forward. Some day this thing’s gonna end. I promise.
    But not today. Today things don’t look so peachy at all. Today you’re going to have to kick back and listen to my nonsense for a good 17 minutes of your day. And what’s more, now we’re getting into the swing of things here, you’ll see I’ve made a slight change to the format of my letters. Exciting, eh! More of that later…
    But first things first. I do hope that you know how much I do appreciate you taking the time out to reply to me personally. Even when my letters veer towards the sarcastic, the hyperbolic. Even when it might feel like I’m giving you a bit of a slapping, literary-speaking. It’s not personal. It’s not bullying. That’s just how I write, Martin. It’s how I was trained to write.
    And the fact you can understand all that and remain so polite makes you a big man. A Big Man. A man’s man. A man’s Big Man.
    So. That’s the polite stuff over and done with. Now to business. Much as I respect you as a man’s Big Man, I find myself once again let down by you and your service.
    I was 17 minutes late for work today. It meant I arrived late for an important meeting. It was a crisis meeting, one of an increasing number of crisis meetings we seem to be having on the showbiz desk. It was a crisis meeting about ethics. About integrity. (Of all the ridiculous things to have a meeting about on the showbiz desk of the Globe , for Christ’s sake.) It was one of those ridiculous meetings where, thanks to the indiscretions and, ahem, eccentricities of our predecessors, we were getting a roasting. It was the whole newspaper in microcosm. It was one of those meetings where we were told not to be so fast and loose with our newsgathering tactics, but at the same time, in the same breath, we were told if we didn’t keep getting the scoops we’d be out on our ears.
    The police have been in touch, apparently. The whole unpleasantness could go beyond a few hacked-off celebs moaning about getting caught with their pants down. It could even get beyond the take-the-money-and-shut-up stage. It’s bad, in other words.
    And yet, we were getting a good going over for not getting more exclusive stories. For not catching more celebs with their pants down. Go figure that one.
    Anyway. The point is: it was an important meeting.
    And I had to walk in late, all elbows and knees, clutching a half-sipped coffee and dropping my notepad and mumbling apologies as everyone stopped talking and watched. In silence. In disapproving silence. I wanted to say: ‘Don’t judge me! Judge Martin Harbottle, Managing Director of Premier Westward trains! He’s the Delilah to my David here! Be silent and disapproving towards him! It’s his fault! It’s all his fault!’
    But of course I couldn’t. I had to grin foolishly and take it like a man. And not a big man, either. Not a man’s Big Man. I had to take it like a small man.
    I don’t understand why we’re getting the blame for the sins of our predecessors at the paper anyway. I don’t understand why this sudden need for self-flagellation. We are the Free Press, right? We have a duty to report the news, whatever it might be.
    And I have no idea why the shadier newsgathering tactics of my forebears should be in any way relevant to my current job churning out