Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time by Dominic Utton Page A

five years ago and a lot of lucrative nonsense in-between. The one with the roving eye and the wandering hands and the entirely unfussy kilt etiquette. Oh yes. It’s all true. And oh no, most of it hasn’t been reported. Not because it’s not true, but because the truth gets suppressed under injunctions, or super injunctions, or privacy rulings, or a significant ‘favour’ for the hapless girl who could prove it to be true (sudden celebrity boyfriend, appearance on reality TV, big fat pile of cash), or a significant threat to the hapless girl who could prove it to be true. Or even occasionally because the papers can’t prove that it’s true without implicating themselves in the process.
    It’s a tightrope. Finding the truth is the easy bit. Being able to tell the truth is another thing entirely.
    Our crooning friend: let’s say, for example, that it became known to someone on the news desk that he enjoyed the attentions of a pair of spectacularly young-looking Estonian girls at an establishment known as ‘Slavs to Love’ in a rather run-down part of London’s once-fashionable Pimlico. Let’s say it became known because another girl at this establishment was concerned that the two Estonians in question were neither there entirely consensually nor of a legal age to consent to anything that our friend might demand of them.
    This is entirely hypothetical, by the way, Martin. You understand that, right? It’s all entirely conjecture and I’m making no accusations against anyone. Good.
    So: let’s say someone from the news desk looks into it. Let’s say she finds the girls, confirms that something is very rum indeed and arranges with them to set up a hidden camera and a mic the next time our priapic lounge lizard comes a knockin’.
    And what happens next?
    Nothing. Slavs to Love is suddenly and mysteriously no more. A police raid. An entirely coincidental police raid the day after our visit. A police raid that came courtesy of an anonymous tip-off. Our girls? Disappeared. Deported. Back to Estonia. The whistleblower who alerted us in the first place? Suddenly spotted out and about on the arm of hot young (gay, as it happens) boy bander Nero Duncan. And she won’t return our calls. And Mr Duncan happens to share an agent with… yes, you guessed. I don’t need to say any more, do I?
    Shocked? It is shocking. And there’s plenty more where that came from. There’s a file of unprovable but entirely true dirt on the man as heavy as the Stone of Scone. And plenty more like him. No wonder he dislikes us so much. We know what he really is.
    But what’s this? Our word count has been reached! Fair’s fair, you only used up 11 minutes of my and Corporate Dungeon Master’s time, and so I’ll take up no more of yours. But I’m sure we’ll speak again soon.
    Au revoir !
    Dan
‌ Letter 13
    From: [email protected]
    To: [email protected]
    Re: 07.31 / 07.52 / 08.06 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, July 12. Amount of my day wasted: err… Fellow sufferers: Lego Head, Universal Grandpa, Competitive Tech Nerds.
    I’ll be straight with you from the start, Martin, I’ll level with you from the get-go: I don’t know how to handle this one.
    The thing is: I didn’t even catch one of your trains this morning. I couldn’t catch the 07.31 because it was cancelled . Why was it cancelled? We were never told. So anyway, undeterred and relentlessly optimistic as always, I stuck around for the 07.52 and guess what? That got cancelled too. We weren’t told why about that, either.
    When the 08.06 joined them in the by-now oh-so-fashionable cancelled club, I walked. I turned around and walked out of there, all the way to the bus station, where I paid a further £15 and caught a coach to London. I left Lego Head and Universal Grandpa looking serenely confused on the platform – Competitive Tech Nerds had already left, swearing at the useless information boards and talking