Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time by Dominic Utton

DD-listers? I might use that next week, in the new Celebrity Big Brother column the editor wants. There’s no official word on whose name will go at the top of it, but Goebbels has been making some seriously encouraging noises), if it wasn’t for their adorable stupidity, their puppyish willingness to impress, to jump through hoops, to sit and stand, beg and roll over for our amusement… why if it wasn’t for these brilliantly desperate, wonderfully awful people, then I would have gone to bed with all my previous intellectual confidence shot.
    I say it again. Thank the Lord for Celebrity Big Brother ! Thank the Lord for celebrities – for being so venal and self-obsessed and narcissistic that we all can’t help but shine in comparison.
    What do you think? Are you in love with the antics of adorable Essex girl and stunning tabloid lovely (she’s my DD-list celeb) Nikki Nyce? Do the post-rehab ramblings of washed-up-by-her-mid-20s American actress Candy Crush give you hope for humanity? Do the macho poses and Neanderthal postulations of former-player-turned-pundit and the man they call football’s Mr Controversy, Graeme Green, make you laugh out loud?
    Will the stream-of-consciousness gibberish and preening, fatuous codswallop they all spout – and actually seem to believe – reset all our disoriented moral compasses and revitalise all our flagging intellects?
    If there’s one thing the Celebrity Big Brother house is teaching me, it is that no matter how stupid I am, or how stupid I do, I’m never going to be as stupid as some. And that, my learned friend, is a beautiful lesson to learn.
    It almost gives me hope!
    Au revoir !
    Dan
‌ Letter 20
    From: [email protected]
    To: [email protected]
    Re: 07.31 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, August 9. Amount of my day wasted: 19 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Train Girl, Lego Head, Universal Grandpa, Guilty New Mum.
    Martin, I very much hope you’re well. Are you well?
    Believe it or not, I ask that sincerely. I want to know. I don’t get to talk to anyone properly, not really, not these days. Work is work and home is… well, home.
    I used to talk to my mum and dad, of course, but they’re no longer around. Not that they’d offer solutions or anything – but that’s not what people talk to their parents for anyway, is it? When you talk to your parents, you just want them to listen. And listen some more. And nod and tut and sigh in the right places. And then tell you it will all be all right in the end. And by talking to them, by having them listen, you kind of work it out for yourself.
    At least, that’s how it was for me. Is that what you do with your kids when they call home from university? Do you just let them talk? Do you listen – or do you try to offer advice, too?
    I used to have quite long chats in this way, with my dad. Me doing all the talking, he doing all the listening. Seems quite odd, in retrospect, but at the time it felt completely natural. And I’d always feel better afterwards.
    Actually, I lie. He would offer advice, in his own way. He’d make crosswords for me, wordsearches, meticulously drawn little games for me to play, one with every letter they’d send to me at uni or, later, in London. And the clues, the answers… often as not they’d have their own advice. Just words, Martin. But the right words.
    I miss that. I miss those crosswords. I miss being told the right words.
    But look at me – I’m getting soft! I’m not writing to you to harp on about my dead dad. I’m writing to complain!
    For example, I spent 19 minutes more on your train this morning than I had originally intended (or you’d originally promised, when I paid for the ticket). Nineteen minutes! What’s all that about, Martin?
    But on the other hand, my morning trains aren’t so bad these days. Not now I have a friend. Train Girl and I: we sit together now, side by side in Coach C (a third of the way up, on the