Dire diary

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

Outsiders labour under a basic misapprehension about corporate hierarchies.  Their image is of poor drudges at the bottom engaged in the mindless repetition of boring, meaningless tasks, with no scope for initiative or independent action.  Top executives, so this wisdom goes, are epitomes of free-booting free will, deciding on a whim the fate of thousands as they lounge around in boardrooms of dark leather and darker mahogany, or glide silently and effortlessly in their chauffeur-driven tinted-window limousines.  Nothing could be further from reality.

It is true that the ordinary office worker has a circumscribed range of functions - but also a concomitant freedom of when and how to carry them out.  An essentially undifferentiated role has no natural time-scales, no unique, imperative pattern: jobs can be moved around, substituted, lost even, with little overall effect.  However pressurised the situation, repose can easily be found - and kept: for into the vacuums and interstices which are created between tasks, there is nothing to flow.

Middle managers enjoy no such luxury.  Theirs is a constant battle between running the business and organising others.  The latter involves meetings, time's weeds which sprout in every available diary gap.  Arranged by a secretary or personal assistant, they are huge milestones mapping out the manager's week, obstacles dumped on the road to real work.  Where office staff paddle docilely in a business's routine backwaters, middle managers must swim hard against buffeting waves of problems simply to remain where they are.  Meetings soon pass from milestones to millstones, threatening to drag them under.  But through them, managers have the first inkling of a truth that will blaze all the more brightly the higher they ascend: that it is the diary which rules them, not the other way round.

Top executives live and breathe this axiom.  All of the week is meetings, meetings involving so many other people, and so complex to set up, that the most senior managers find themselves totally impotent in the face of their day's hijacking.  Now, they can only flow with the overmastering tide, and join the corporate flotsam.  Because top bosses are meta-managers - they run a business not by managing it directly, but by managing those who do - they find themselves in thrall not only to the clashing diaries of their immediate juniors, but through the corporation's pyramidal structure to those of their underlings' underlings too.  

The enmeshing diary becomes a prescriptive book of their entire lives.  Such are the demands on their limited time that business appointments spill over into evenings and weekends - the company functions, the client outings, the overseas travel.  Far from being mighty corporate warriors cutting a swathe through the financial thickets, they are huge pin-striped puppets without a puppet-master, slaves of the system which they sustain and which sustains them.  Trapped as they are by the very power that they wield, many a senior executive must have snatched a precious moment during yet another meeting in those boring boardrooms of dark leather and darker mahogany to envy the simple, untrammelled life of the worker; just as kings and queens have ever envied the uncomplicated, idealised bucolic existence of shepherds and shepherdesses; and just as forlornly.

(1989)

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8.8.88

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

'Now, who can tell me today's date?'  I remember the teacher standing in front of the class; a female teacher, so perhaps it was Miss Pinkney or Mrs Sutcliffe - but not Miss Grogden or Mrs Day.  I am at the back of the class to the right, next to Angela - but this may have been the following year.  I half remember sitting next to my best friend, Neil Campion, at some stage, which must have been around this time, towards the end of my infant schooldays.  Perhaps he sat in front of me.  I suppose I should be amazed at how easily I lost touch with him.  I never saw him again, though I do remember being told how his brother - who had a withered left arm with a rather disturbing hook-like device he clipped over it - was killed a couple of years later when he rode his motorbike into an unlit skip late at night.  Apparently his girlfriend riding pillion was also killed, but none of this touched me in the slightest.

'And what is special about today's date?'  Our double desk - whoever it was that shared with me - consisted of a top with a kind of rectangular cavity underneath.  In it we would keep all our text and exercise books, along with pencils and rubbers and set squares and the like.  I remember that I arranged mine in two neat ziggurat forms, one in each corner.

'And when will be the next time that that happens?'  Outside, in the sunlight, lay the grass playing area bounded by a high wire netting fence.  At the far end this gave on to the forbidden sports fields of the secondary modern school next door.  I never knew anything about this place, except that it was where most of those at my primary school ended up.  It never occurred to me to wonder whether I too would go there.  Not that I assumed I would automatically go to a grammar school, because I would not have recognised the concept; it was more that I spent my childhood in a strange kind of volitional and experiential haze.

'Yes, Glyn?'  But I did know what the date was, what was special about it, and when it would happen again.  The answer seemed obvious, and that I should know it, natural.  Like my desk, like the sunshine that poured in through the high windows, like the steady progress through the junior school towards the 11+ exam and beyond, everything in my world seemed perfectly ordered and perfectly right.  My schooldays were hardly the happiest of my life, but they were totally stress-free, insouciant, and frictionless.  I scarcely felt them pass at all.  Time flew by in standing still.

Thus it is that I have few memories from that time, just the odd, flickering image from each year.  But the question that opened that June morning has remained with me ever since.  Eleven years, one month and one day after hearing it, I wrote on my 1977 desktop diary for 7 July: '(remember 6.6.66?)'.  And I did.

And I do today.  The anniversaries are moments of punctuation which come round with a quirky regularity, as if governed by sunspot activity.  Like strange, temporal vortices, they exert a complex force.  All my life, I know, they will give me pause for thought: thought for what was on these dates in the past; and thought for what might be in the future.

(1988)

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