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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Windy City

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Some sat at their desks, fiddling with pencils and paperclips.  Others stood in the corridors, dimly lit by the emergency power.  With no phones and no electricity, there was nothing to be done.  An enormous silence hung over the whole building.  Outside, there was a clear blue sky.

Upon waking that morning, it was apparent that something was wrong.  The alarm radio had not gone off: its display was dead.  Throughout the still house all the electric clocks had stopped at the same moment: 4.34 am; it was as if time had had a heart attack.  No light, no hot water, no kettle: the tiny marginal acts of civilisation had been cancelled.

People stumbled into work as if in a trance, more out of habit than from any real sense of necessity.  Everywhere there were scenes of destruction:  huge trees uprooted, lying stricken across the road.  Cars were driven under them with white-knuckled bravado, or gingerly past them, up on the pavement.  People milled around, some taking photographs.  There were no trains and few buses.  An occasional ambulance flashed by.

On the radio the police issued urgent pleas for everyone to stay at home; it was pointless going to work they said.  And the radio itself was strangely different.  Bulletins were broadcast every ten minutes.  The mindless music and vacuous ads had all but stopped.  Instead, the catalogue of deaths and disasters, the no-go areas and the helplessness of the authorities were hammered home with a kind of crazy glee.  A curious jitter ran through people, as if someone had walked over their collective grave.  It felt like the end of the world.

It was the Great Wind of '87.  'The worst weather in 300 years', they said, 'the worst disaster since the war'.  The dead, though few, were publicly lamented - so alien to this sanitised world of ours is random, violent death through force of Nature.  Everyone felt an aesthetic pang at the sight of centuries of trees laid low in the dust; still majestic like fallen royalty, but doomed and irreplaceable.  But most of all people felt themselves chastened, as if they had narrowly escaped something unthinkable.  A case of presque-vu.

For winds, albeit of record speeds, had shut down the whole seething, pullulating metropolis of London.  No transport, no telephones, and worst of all, no power.  Mere air had pulled the plug on late twentieth century civilisation in so comprehensive a manner that people could only stand around and stare impotently.  Power and telephone lines were restored after some hours, but the effects of that great wind were felt directly for days after, and the scars would remain for decades.

Imagine, then, a greater wind, an unnatural wind whose very touch is death.  After a nuclear explosion, following the huge pulse of radiation, but before the even more horrifying fall-out of radioactive debris, there is a shock wave.  That shock wave moves across the land like the Voice of God in the Old Testament: it is swift and terrible and unstoppable.  In comparison the Great Wind of '87 will seem a light spring breeze.  Looking around at our silent, desolated city, were we not right to be windy?

(1987)

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Invisible royalty

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It has been a dream since time immemorial to be granted one infinitely potent wish.  For those in myth and fable who have realised this dream, the results have not been happy.  When Paris asked for the most beautiful woman in the world, he gained not only Helen but also the Trojan War, his city's fall and his own death.  And Midas' unconsidered lust for gold destroyed the only thing he loved, his daughter.

People err in choosing causes rather than effects.  We say we want limitless wealth or power: we should consider why we want them.  Wealth and power are abstractions, realised only in their manifestation as ulterior objects and acts.  Given that any cause ramifies infinitely and in unsuspected ways, it is hardly surprising that neglecting to specify effects brings its attendant problems.

Intoxicated by possibilities, people also err in going to extremes.  To be rich you do not need to turn everything you touch to a precious metal, however seductive the symbolism may be.  Similarly, dominion over the world is trickier to wield than to ask for: the higher you rise, the more visible your success, the more obvious the disparity between you and your rivals, and the greater the incentive for them to pull you down.

The secret of success in this endeavour seems to lie in two things.  First, to specify very precisely the desired result, and secondly to cause as few ripples as possible.  Ideally this would imply that you get what you want without disturbing the rest of the world in the slightest; then there are no vengeful Agamemnons to come thundering after you.

Following these principles, the perfect wish might be based on a simple, everyday observation: that sometimes you seem to be flowing with the tide, sometimes against it.  In the former condition, you turn up at a station, and a train appears ten seconds later; when you arrive at a theatre that is sold out, somebody next to you asks if anyone would like to buy some spare tickets; traffic lights turn green as you approach them, allowing you to drive straight through without slowing down.  All of these things happen to all of us; but not all of the time.  My wish would be that, for me, they did.

I do not specify how this is to happen: I ask only for some mild effects.  Mild because as far as the rest of the world is concerned, they do not exist.  For everyone else, the train would continue to arrive randomly, sometimes just after they arrive, sometimes not.  Spare tickets would still occasionally materialise for sold-out performances.  Only from my privileged perspective is something special going on.  There would be no resentment, no attempts to deny me this convenience, because no one would be aware of it.

Contrast this with the people for whom the train does always leave just after they arrive, and who never are turned away from theatres or wait for red traffic lights.  Those who have this awesome power today are called royalty; and the price they pay for it is awesome too.  I, who would pay nothing, would be a new, more splendid variety: an invisible royalty.

(1987)

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