The Planner(10)

Hi James,

Great to hear from you, and thanks for getting back. Good to hear that everything is still going so well down in London – I always knew you’d make a success of it.

Yes, the title would be Deputy Director, with full pay + conditions – I don’t think I could lure you back here with anything less! The job’s not completely in my gift (as ever, there’s an open and competitive process!!) But I could get you in on an acting basis for six months without any bother, and assuming it all works ok it would be relatively easy for you to then apply for the permanent role. Judith Davies has retired and HR are being a bit more cooperative these days.

Anyway, let me know. As I said, Guy isn’t meant to be leaving for almost 3 months, so you’ve got time to think about it.



And there it was: an informative and sincere email, without any of the guile and ambiguity that James had become accustomed to. That was, James remembered, what Graham was like. He wasn’t like Lionel: he hadn’t kept his job through cunning, but by working hard and being good at it. There again, Nottingham wasn’t like South London. People and planners there were straightforward and tended to speak the truth. They were, he supposed, nicer.

There was another mail in his inbox. It was from Felix Selwood, and it was much shorter. The message itself was blank and the subject title was just two words: ‘Drink tonight?’



Eight hours later and James was in the Red Lion, around the corner from work. Nothing very unusual about that – it was, after all, a Friday night. But the big difference, the important innovation, was that he wasn’t with anyone from the office and nor, thankfully, was he with any friends from university. He was with Felix.

Any wariness, and there had been plenty, had disappeared and James was almost starting to enjoy himself. They had had three pints of beer, that had helped, but there was more to it than that: they had formed a connection. They were allies and, as far as James could tell, it wasn’t based on loneliness, a mutual enemy or shared feelings of inadequacy.

They had some significant things in common. They were both thirty-two years old, single, and yes – Felix was a planner too! It even said so on his business card. But he was a brand planner, an occupation that James had never previously known to exist but, as Felix explained to him, was central to how modern advertising, and therefore modern business, worked. There were some parallels: one of them made plans for consumers and one of them made plans for citizens. They both convened focus groups, and studied forecasts, and then had to write and implement strategies, which only rarely led to anything happening in the way they hoped.

Of course, there were some important differences. As Felix said, it was his job to understand what people thought they wanted, while James’s job was more difficult – he had to understand what they ought to want. And one of them was much better paid than the other. James had a salary of £33,650 a year, with an extra £3,500 through his London weighting agreement; Felix earned £95,000 with a 20 per cent performance bonus and other benefits. But that didn’t matter so very much, because Felix was quite wealthy anyway. And, of course, Felix didn’t have a degree in geography.

‘It was my good fortune,’ he said, ‘to have studied some economics. This really ought to be a sub-branch of sociology, but has ended up providing the only kinds of explanation that anyone is now interested in.’

James noticed that Felix spoke like this a lot of the time. He articulated bold and unusual opinions in full declarative sentences that caught the attention of people outside of his immediate group. Where had he come from? From London, obviously, but that could mean anything. He was Adam’s friend, and he knew Carl, but it wasn’t clear how. In fact, thrillingly, it wasn’t even certain if he liked them all that much.

But the main thing they were discussing, and this really was unusual, was James. Felix was interested in James. Interested enough to email him, to come to this pub, and possibly even to help him. And despite having wise things to say on a range of important topics, he was also, just like James, a very good listener. He was attentive, he prompted with little nods and requests for information, and in no time at all James was speaking without inhibition. What did he have to lose? He talked about the night in the restaurant, and why he had run away to the washrooms, and how mysteriously his friends had become wealthy and Alice attractive. He talked about where he worked and where he lived, the difficulty of being a town planner in the modern world, the job offer in Nottingham and the fears and feelings that pulsed through him every day.

‘So, I’m going to ask you a few questions now,’ said Felix.