The Planner(6)

‘Agenda item two: review of last meeting’s minutes.’

There was a movement of papers, a little anxious pause as no one said anything. James sipped his tea, confident that he alone had actually read the minutes.

‘So, are you happy for me to sign these off?’ said Lionel.

There was some gentle nodding and benevolent murmuring. It seemed that everyone was happy for everyone else to sign them off.

‘Okay, good. Item three: the main event, and I know there’s been considerable interest in this one,’ said Lionel, with a small chuckle. ‘Neil here is going to give us a briefing from his transport study.’

It was Monday morning, just after nine o’clock, in Meeting Room Two on the fourth floor of Southwark Council. With a little preparatory cough, Neil Tuffnel, Senior Planning Research Officer, launched into his PowerPoint presentation on the interim findings of his study on long-term surface transport projections. James sat back in his chair. The meeting, which was scheduled to last for two hours, stretched comfortably ahead of him.

James could identify each of the Planning Directorate’s four data projectors by the pitch and rhythm of its hum, and this happened to be his favourite – not necessarily the quietest, but the least irregular. Rachel, sitting opposite, gave him a resigned smile. The room was over-warm. Already, Jane Nichols, Environmental Policy Manager and just two years away from retirement, was looking sleepy. The Assistant Director of Road Networks from Transport for London, a well-known prick, had sent his apologies, rendering the meeting worthless, but there could be no question of not going ahead with it. James started to think carefully about which biscuit to select from the plate in front of him.

Neil moved on to the second slide. James had already read the presentation, which had been emailed along with the agenda, and Neil was not the kind of man to deviate from it. For thirty minutes, he carefully took them through every bullet point and figure, every graph and calculation.

Lionel was chairing the meeting with great experience but not much skill. Poor old deciduous old Lionel, with his dry skin and wet eyes, his pink nose and unhappy pouch. The seasons hadn’t been good to him. He had ineffectively chaired too many meetings, watched too many PowerPoints and dunked too many biscuits into mugs of sugared coffee. His career had peaked: he had reached the top band of his salary grade some years ago, and barely survived the last round of budget cuts. He breathed through his mouth too much and it was almost certain that at some point he would die of cancer.

Wanting to rest his eyes on something else, James looked out through the glass wall of the meeting room into the office beyond and, as he did so, he felt a surge of primitive and irrational tenderness for his colleagues. It wasn’t like his friendships – there was affection here and there was intimacy. All these people, for all these years, who he had lowered his head to look at so that they didn’t have to crane theirs to look up. He knew without asking how Lionel, Rachel and many others took their tea, whose mug was whose, and who minded and who didn’t if they got someone else’s. He knew that Neil liked coffee but no more than one cup a day or else he got anxious, and that since her heart scare Rupinder only drank green tea from her own packet. He knew the type of biscuits and confectionery they preferred, and which football teams they supported, and on Monday mornings he would ask them about the weekend and be rewarded with long friendly conversations that he had no interest in.

Of course, they couldn’t all be friends. That wouldn’t work. They needed other things, other people to bring them together. They didn’t have business competitors, but they did have common threats and predators: senior managers, who were mostly terrible bastards, and the politicians, who they hardly ever got to meet but who were stupid and could make bad things happen to them. And there were lots of other, more minor, villains, bullies and dickheads for them to fill their days complaining about. There were those pernicious idiots in the Communications Team who made unfair demands and didn’t understand anything that the organisation did, the entire Human Resources department, the drunkards in the postroom, and the IT officers with their foul manners and obscure powers.

There was an unexpected pause. Neil had finished, but it wasn’t clear that the others had been following him closely enough to realise. Lionel hadn’t been concentrating, and was looking elsewhere, and even Rachel didn’t seem to have been listening. Neil was looking up, unsure what to do next. But this was the kind of situation in which James thrived, and he had already designed a suitable question to ask.

‘Sorry, Neil, could you just talk us through the methodology you used for these estimates? Was it a telephone survey? It would be good to get a handle on the sample sizes as well.’