Bonus Content: A Week From My Window
After a week of stupendous media cant, the least I can do is lift my Diary paywall so no one misses out on how the Barbara J. Pym affair exposes the true locus and extent of journalistic pharisaism.
They wouldn’t let it lie
SATURDAY
I like Eoghan Harris. I have since I first got to know him 33 years ago, when I was editor of Magill and I met him for lunch to ask him to write for us but he said no. I continued to like him, even when he was describing me for a whole decade as a ‘tribal witchdoctor’, because of my attitude to certain historical episodes. After a couple of years’ counselling I was able to regain something of my equilibrium and tentatively re-enter society.
He gave me the scoop of my life in 1990, when he was secretly working for Mary Robinson in her presidential campaign. He and I were in almost daily contact then, and the day of the count he gave me a copy of his now legendary blueprint for her campaign. I wrote a long article for the front of the Irish Times’s Saturday supplement but the Political Editor Dick Walsh put his spoke in and had it spiked at the last moment. A brief extract was buried away on an inside page of the main paper, and nobody saw it. A year or so later, Emily O’Reilly got hold of the same document and wrote it up as the centrepiece of a book about the Robinson campaign, and all the hacks, including Dick Walsh, lauded this ‘scoop’ to the heavens.
In many ways, I now regard that moment (of the Robinson victory) as one of the most retrograde in our recent history (long story — beginning of the ‘progressive Ireland’ that has now become the bane of any sentient Irish person’s life).
It was Harris wot dunnit: he convinced Robinson that she could win, in spite of what he called the Labour Party's pathology of losing, which has continued unbroken ever since. He told her how to talk proper, what to say and how to have her hair cut so the plebs would get over her congenital Ballina poshness.
But I still like him. Anytime we meet I roll away laughing hysterically about something. He is a super-spreader of infectious laughter.
I remember one morning during the Clifden Arts Festival a good few years ago (when I had as yet not spilled enough truths to be disinvited) we caused consternation in the Station House Hotel dining room (is Clifden alone in having a station hotel but no station?) on account of the amount of loud laughter we emitted in the course of an exchange of stories about a well-known Booker Prize-winning Irish Novelist.
Years ago, Harris, Eamon Dunphy and I used to feature regularly as a team on the Late Late Show, talking about politics. RTÉ promoted us as ‘Three Angry Old Men’, to which young Dunphy, who has a good ten years on me, used to object. There’s a book in that experience alone.
I was sorry to see Harris in trouble this week.
Of course (cue pompous, distancing voice) I cannot condone what he did. Actually, I don’t ‘condone’ anything that happens on Twitter. It’s no secret that, if I had my way, it would have been closed down a decade ago. I don’t really care whether accounts are fake or not — it’s still a rancid platform.
I have long believed that 99 per cent of journalists are on Twitter under multiple fake accounts, but most of them just haven’t been caught yet. Harris got unlucky.
It’s been brought to my attention that a number of people have been tweeting about a certain episode from seven years ago in which I was attacked by an Irish Times colleague using a fake Twitter account with the handle ‘Thomas59’. People have apparently been asking when the culprit in that affair is going to be fired. He’s still there — still, as Charlie Haughey might have said, ‘pontificating away’.
It seems to me that there’s a world of difference between that and the Harris business. Harris is a genuine intellectual, with a very clear and convinced view of the world. His often solitary opposition to Sinn Féin has been a hugely important element of the public discourse for over half a century, and I could recognise that even at times when events put us on opposite sides of certain questions. He’s never been shy about taking on the Shinners and the ‘Barbara J Pym’ account appears to have been more or less dedicated to that purpose, all the more vital now that the Shinners are on the cusp of being in power in both political parts of this island.
I heard someone tweeted that the reason Harris was sacked, and Patsy McGarry (aka Thomas59) — for it was he — wasn’t, was that Sinn Féin has more power than John Waters, which is a bit like saying that Jeff Bezos has more money than the Dalai Lama.
I wrote a chapter about the McGarry episode in Give Us Back the Bad Roads which you can read here and there is very little I would wish to add at this stage. One thing that grated this week was the Sindo Editor’s pious bleating about the Harris situation, saying that the reason Eoghan had to go was that his actions had being out of synch with the ‘core values of openness, transparency and the highest journalistic standards’ of the newspaper. That would be the same Sindo that, at the time of the Thomas59 episode, after I outed the culprit in Village magazine, carried a front page snow-job on McGarry by one Daniel McConnell, now with the Irish Examiner.
I’m also told that, in the past, whenever McGarry has been bearded by fellow Twitterati about what happened, he has claimed that the account was not a fake one, that his identity was clear. The pretext for this untruth was that one of his ‘handles’ included the number 2805607, his home phone number, a fact that would have been known to about a dozen people in the entire world. This is the story that was pushed at the time by his mates in RTÉ, but it is bogus. Why, if the account was open and above board, did he issue one final tweet after I blew the whistle on him: ‘One has been rumbled by H2O. But does one care? Non. Who needs such cruel friends?’
The ‘cruel friends’ part was a reference to me, presumably because I was accused of being less than gung ho for gay marriage. It may be thought relevant that the Thomas59 campaign against me coincided with a period when I had been helping a relative of McGarry’s who was having difficulties of a legal nature and for a time was suicidal. This individual had been given my name and number by McGarry, presumably because of my notorious cruelty.
Even after I had forced the Editor of the Irish Times to speak to McGarry, he was permitted to issue a valedictory tweet, as if he was the good guy being snatched from his lofty moral perch by the reactionary H2O.
There were significant differences between that episode and the latest fuss. In the Pym case, Eoghan Harris was engaged in a street-corner fracas, which is essentially the meat and potatoes of Twitter. I, on the other hand, was — or thought I was — working in a newspaper that existed for the purposes of supporting and inspiring public debate, and was being attacked pseudonymously by a supposed colleague with the tacit blessing of the Editor. Harris lost his job, which I think disproportionate. Back in 2014, I wasn’t seeking McGarry’s head on a plate, just asking the Editor to do his job and defend one of his journalists. McGarry kept his job. I had no choice but to leave, since the Editor refused to support me in doing my job (this being the core of the whole thing: I was being attacked because I insisted on expressing my opinions, which is what the Irish Times paid me to do.)
There are no principles to be found here because there are no principles to be found in or about the mainstream legacy media. It's all about assassinating those who refuse to kow-tow — in 2014 with me, in 2021 with Eoghan Harris. If there appears to be a contradiction, it's because there is, but nobody in the mainstream of the Irish media is interested anymore in highlighting matters of principle or ethics. What's important is furthering the agenda(s).
Nor did anybody in journalism, in the Irish Times or outside it, emerge to support me publicly, although a few people in the IT did write or approach me privately to say how horrified they were by my treatment. One of those, I can now exclusively reveal, was the late Noel Whelan, with whom I had a friendly relationship, despite many ideological/political differences, which continued through two subsequent referendums. Noel sent me a kind and flattering note in which he expressed horror at what had occurred. He was a nice man, I tell you.
SUNDAY
Strange, the way, with human and social situations, you find that everything changes when the time comes for it, just like in nature or politics. In any situation, everything always seems to be as it is supposed to be, and there’s not a lot you can do about it, until one day it changes and then it goes on changing until everything either falls apart or renews itself.
The Covid thing is going like that now. For a year, it seemed that nothing would ever give. We were trapped in this insanity and could not escape. Now, I feel that everything is starting to go. You get this with governments: In the beginning, a government can do no wrong; in the end it’s overcome by, first, minor failure, then growing unpopularity, then moral collapse. So it is with Covid. Reality is reasserting itself. They kept us locked up for over a year, and we could barely describe how that made us feel. The ineffability of it was perhaps its most debilitating aspect: Because it provoked such inexpressible feelings of frustration and incomprehension, it seemed impossible at some levels that it could actually be happening, and this was exacerbated by the fact that most other people seemed to think it entirely normal. Reality had been suspended, or was suspending itself. The normal forces of cause and effect seemed to have gone into quarantine. Every day, the politicians and health tsars lied through their teeth without consequence because the media refused to call them out, so all we could do was grind our own teeth and sit it out.
Now the denouement has started to unfold. For more than a year they were able to prolong the fraud, and condemn us to a succession of Groundhog days by dint of industrial lying and funny money, our lives arrested without probable cause. But now the sound of hissing tells us their ball has burst, and the next stage is consequences. India is doing a little to retard things, but anybody who can do basic arithmetic is not long taken in by that lie. (Divide every stat by 280 to get the Irish equivalent: 2,000 deaths = 7, and so forth. It’s over, boys. Strap your parachutes on. Or else try to negotiate your passage to Argentina, where all the big Nazis went to die.
The fatal thing was not so much overreach as over-confidence. It was all so much easier than they expected. So they started to think of enforcing their own insanity on the country as normal reality. Hence the surprise — nay, horror — when the French and Italian ambassadors called around to call them Nazis too. Moi?
Deep-sea divers tell of a certain depth at which the human brain becomes possessed of the illusion that natural breathing is again possible. When this happens, the diver removes his helmet and drowns. It is a kind of fatal enchantment called le vertige des grandes profondeurs — 'the vertigo of the great depths'. This is kind of what happened: They created an entirely implausible false reality which, by a process of contagion, they managed to convince almost everybody to believe in. The enchantment was so contagious that it always threatened to infect its creators and manipulators, but they got so cocky that they overlooked to take the most rudimentary precautions. The vertigo of the great depths — here, the vertigo of the great depth manipulators — convinced them that they were walking on solid ground, when in reality they had unwittingly gone below the advised danger territory.
I don't say it's the beginning of the end but I think, as the man said, it's the end of the beginning. The Consequences phase should rattle along pretty snappily. By the end of the summer, Paddy will be foaming at the mouth, as the carnage is exposed. The health junta and their political gofers will by then be drowning in the tide of their own lies coming back to overwhelm them.
MONDAY
I had one query from a media source looking for a comment about the resonance between the Barbara J. Pym and Thomas59 episodes. It was from a journalist I worked with years ago who’s now working for an off-mainstream organ, the voice of a far from off-mainstream professional body.
Fo old time’s sake, I replied that, as far as I could see, most journalists appear to be operating at least one fake Twitter account; editors, generally speaking, know this but it suits their various agendas so they turn blind eyes; most newspapers have social media codes and protocols but these are not worth the paper they're not written on.
And if everyone is at it — and they are — why was Harris being singled out?
I also said that, although not a fan of fake Twitter accounts, from what I'd seen of the Barbara J. Pym tweets, they were pretty run-of-the-mill political commentary, obviously with the kind of slant you'd get from someone who didn't like SF.
I conjectured that Harris was shafted to offset the inevitable screeching from SF if/when the truth ever came out, and to cover his Editor's ass against such an eventuality. Everyone, I said, is running scared of SF, and for good reason. ‘Apart from Harris, of course, but all the more reason why he had to be shafted.’
Ultimately, it all comes down to ideology. Both Eoghan and I sustain a lot of ideological shrapnel, though from different directions. We have many enemies because we speak inconvenient truths. McGarry is a luvvie with a whole raft of predictable, Woke-ish views, and so occasionally functions as a useful innocent. Harris had to go — in large part because the Shinners have the power to make things very uncomfortable for the Sindo, especially, as seems unstoppable, when they end up in government in, at most, three years time.
The journalist got back to me a few hours later to say the editor had given the thumbs-down to the item because the publication ‘doesn’t criticise political parties’. See what I mean?
It’s simple, really: If you’re serious about introducing fascism, it would be silly to overlook the availability of actually existing fascists right on the spot. All the relevant agencies had already received their orders. Harris had to go.
TUESDAY
Someone told me Fintan O’Toole had done a hatchet-job on Eoghan Harris. I refused to believe it until I saw the screen-grabs. I could scarcely credit it even then, but the evidence was ineluctable.
I thought he would have let it lie. But this is what arrogance and immunity from criticism leads: People start forgetting things and allowing their manufactured sense of their own moral rectitude to lead them into exposing their hard-necks and two-facedness.
He should’ve let it lie.
O’Toole, you see, was a ‘follower’ of Thomas59. I don’t mean that he followed Patsy McGarry around in the street, five paces behind in the manner of a Muslim wifey. I mean he was, on the date(s) in question, one of his followers on Twitter. One of his five followers, that is, for Thomas was only getting things off the ground when it all started to fall apart. As Thomas59 disgorged his nightly assaults on my character, Fintan was there, all the time, skulking in the shadows, keeping a watching brief, perhaps even maintaining a supervisory role in whatever malign mission was being set in train.
Since I wrote about this in Village magazine in April 2014, and again in my 2018 book, Give Us Back the Bad Roads (GUBBR), you would think that Fintan might have had the sense to stay out of the Harris schemozzle. But no. He wouldn’t let it lie.
In the GUBBR account, I wrote:
‘On 14 February [2014] I sent a comprehensive portfolio on Thomas59 by email to the Editor of The Irish Times, Kevin O'Sullivan and his deputy Denis Staunton. I drew attention to the implications of Thomas59’s behaviour for the reputation of The Irish Times as a voice of diversity and balance in Irish society, revealing the identity of the individual in question, and demonstrating beyond doubt that he was tweeting aggressively on virtually a nightly basis against colleagues and people he was expected to write objectively about in his job. I supplied texts of his numerous tweets and indicated the identities of several of his 'followers', including the Irish Times Assistant Editor, Literary Editor and columnist, Fintan OToole. Had I been Editor of The Irish Times, I would have been keen to put these questions to Fintan: What interest did he have in the twitterings of Thomas59? Was he aware of the true identity of this individual? If so, what did he have to say for himself? If not, why was he one of Thomas59’s followers?’
Needless to say, I received no responses to any of these questions. My theory was and is that the Thomas 59 account was some kind of experiment from within the Irish Times as part of a plan to run some kind of ‘dirty war’ against opponents of the — at that stage — imminent gay marriage referendum.
I also, incidentally, raised the matter with Paul O’Neill, then third in command as ‘Editorial Director’ or some such, and now the Editor. He claimed to be dismayed by what was happening but said he had no power to do anything about it. He has now been Editor of the paper for four years and has done nothing about pretty much everything.
Fintan himself has kept schtum for seven years. When I heard about the Pym business, I wondered would he be able to resist having a go at Harris, and naively decided he would continue the schtum demeanour. But, like I say, arrogance and hypocrisy are terrible afflictions.
He could’ve let it lie.
His attack on Harris was as personal and nasty as only Fintan can be when it suits him to drop the priestly demeanour. Of course, being Fintan, it came lacquered with a veneer of literary allusion, in this case from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1777 play The School for Scandal, and its characters Sneerwell and Snake, good choices both for the errand he had elected to undertake. ‘Anonymous backbiting’, quoth Fintan, ‘was as contemptible 250 years ago as it is now. No one in 1777 was in the slightest doubt that Sneerwell and Snake were the villains of the piece.’
He wouldn’t let it lie.
He might as readily have said that anonymous backbiting was ‘as contemptible seven years ago as it is now.’
I don’t enjoy giving his utterly disproportionate attack on Harris the oxygen of publicity; Harris does not deserve it. So I would like people to think of the target of the following passages being somebody other than Eoghan Harris, maybe even Fintan himself.
And if I were to step forward with appropriate decorum and lay down the following, by way of wreaths on the cenotaph of Fintan O’Toole’s moral credibility, you might get the general idea of his hypocritical spleen:
‘John Milton in the 17th century taunted an anonymous pamphleteer: You there! Who are you? A man or a nobody? Surely not the basest of men — not even slaves — are without a name.’ Appropriate quote, Fintan, but where was Milton in 2014?
‘For a political columnist working in a democratic society, anonymity [and perhaps also standing four-square with an anonymous troll assassin whose identity you are aware of?] is a betrayal. What it betrays is the implicit contract between writer and reader.’
Yes, yes I said yes it does Yes.
‘Accountability is not optional in this business. It is the job description. If you don't accept it for yourself, you have no right whatever to demand it of others. And if you don't have that right, you can't do the work journalism exists to do.’
Tread softly, Fintan, for you tread on Patsy’s Hush Puppies.
‘As well as the public value of accountability, there is also surely a private ethic of decency. Never mind blather about Edmund Burke — ’ [Harris had cited Burke’s pseudonymous writings in one interview] ‘didn't our parents bring us up not to be sneaks and cowards? Didn't we learn that you don't say things behind a person's back that you would not say to their face?’
Great questions, Fintan. Did you ever put them to Patsy? What was his reply? ‘Your hypocrisy insults my intelligence’?
‘What kind of thrill is there in erasing your own name and choosing to engage in public debate as a literal nobody? Is there some kind of pleasure in slumming it down the dark alleys of cyberspace with all the millions of trolls and bots who value their own opinions so cheaply that they are ashamed to put their names to them?’
Great questions, greater insinuations: ‘Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.’
‘The resurgence, through social media, of anonymity as a primary mode of public discourse is corrosive of both personal decency and of democratic debate.’
Except for Patsy and Fintan, right? Rules for thee but not for me?
‘Trolls don't put their names to bad stuff because they want to keep them free of the taint of gutless spite. They know anonymity is a form of shame. Journalists should be at least as careful of their own good names.’
Tis true. Lies like to lie with lies. But what of journalists who are happy to stand with trolls churning out ‘bad stuff’ so long as the target is the right one and there appears to be no chance of getting caught?
And what — perish the thought — if the people concerned have no shame?
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
WEDNESDAY
Someone sent me a screen-grab of McGarry’s Wikipedia entry. I know these things are written by either your friends (the ‘good guys’ entries, that is) or your enemies (bad guys like me), but get a load of this. The reference to the Thomas59 episode consists of a single line: ‘In February 2014 he was implicated by fellow Irish Times journalist John Waters as the author of a handful of ad hominem tweets, written anonymously, that suggested a bias against Catholic social teaching.’
That’s a bit like, I dunno, a Wikipedia entry for McGarry and O’Toole’s former colleague, Tom Humphries, reading: ‘He left the Irish Times following accusations of adultery.’
THURSDAY
A phrase caught my eye in an email from an American reader. He was talking about the ‘three crises’ supposedly confronting the US and ‘necessitating urgent and drastic action’: racism, carbon dioxide and coronavirus’, three ‘invisible menaces’ that stand at the gate threatening to destroy our civilisation, even our very lives.
Then it comes (he was being sarky): ‘The answer, of course, is to go ahead and destroy everything ourselves, so that they won’t get the best of us.’
I have seen nothing as succinct, nothing that so cleanly cuts through all the verbiage, nothing that so fundamentally ‘explains’ what has been happening for the past year.
The perfect metaphor came to me: Self-harm. I have heard psychiatrists discourse on the idea that self-harm, in the sense of someone actually physically harming themselves, perhaps with a knife, is a way of transferring psychic pain, which seems unreachable, unmanageable, to the body, where at least it falls within the domain of the body’s ‘owner’.
The act of, for example, ‘cutting’ or ‘scratching’ delivers something inexpressible into something unquestionably real, renders invisible thoughts or feelings into something visible. It gives back a sense of control. After self-harming you feel a short-term sense of release, but the cause of your distress remains. It is also a form of self-punishment, which may sometimes have a religious basis. Psychiatrists warn that ‘self-harm can also bring up very difficult emotions and could make you feel worse.’
Here’s another cracker of metaphorical development from one of the many pages on the topic:
‘Even though there are always reasons underneath someone hurting themselves, it is important to know that self-harm does carry risks. Once you have started to depend on self-harm, it can take a long time to stop.’
People tell me that ‘they’ are going to ‘take down’ the world economy as part of the Covid thing, so as to ‘build back better’ (and in ‘their’ own interests). But this, if true, would represent a total failure to understand what an economy is — an ecology, an organism rooted in human desiring.
The ‘logic’ of the Great Reset, and all such like formulations of the alleged longer-term response to issues like Covid and climate change, is to reduce or stop people’s consumption in certain areas. Alongside this is the idea of replacing the granular activity of the economy with corporate initiative, which eliminates duplication, waste, inefficiency through economies of scale. Instead of everyone running around doing bits and pieces for one another, they’ll just sit in their houses watching Netflix and Jeff will take care of everything.
I don’t think you need to be an economist to see that this is nonsense. In fact, I have a suspicion that the only people who cannot see it are the economists.
There’s a fly in the ointment: Functional economics depends on a balance of production and consumption, and this balance is prone to — indeed depends on — elements of stochasticism and chaos. Henry Ford understood this. Though a pretty tight-arsed kind of guy, he always insisted on paying his workers enough money that they could afford to buy one of his cars. The idea of paying people €350 a week to watch TV, while the robots got on with building Bronco SUVs would have left him cold.
Put it another way. A couple of years back, my wife and I were in Dublin Airport very early in the morning and getting very frustrated with the way we were expected to carry out every function that hitherto had been done by an Aer Lingus or Ryanair employee. There was nobody behind any of the counters, or at least nobody whose job it was to do for us the stuff that was once regarded as the function of an airline employee. We had to check ourselves in, check in our bags, tag them. Yet, at every machine there was an ‘operative’ to advise and, presumably, help if things went wrong. I was inclined to wonder why the ‘operative’ couldn’t just check us in, check our bags in and tag them. Then (I said it was early morning) the thought occurred: This is a transitional phase; next time there may be no operative.
I remarked on this to my wife and she said something like, ‘Oh that’s the way everything is going’, which is probably what I would have said myself if she had made the same observation to me as I had just made to her.
But then it occurred to me: That won’t work. Everybody seems to think this will work, that it’s ‘the future’, but you could see, right there in the airport check-in area, that it is impossible.
The problem is that, if all the people are on the same side of the counter, the Law of Diminishing Returns will soon see to it that there is nobody on either side. Because: Where are the people who wish to fly in the aeroplanes going to get the money to buy the tickets when they no longer have a way of earning sufficient income? Of course, this metaphor is somewhat complicated by the idea that ‘they’ want to stop us travelling by air, but let’s leave that to one side for now.
Super-efficiency and ‘rationalisation’ work as short-cuts or economies in a functioning system, but they cannot of themselves create the system or sustain it. Such approaches are, in a sense, parasitical, because they ignore the human element.
The problem has to do with greed. When Gordon Gekko declared that ‘greed is good’ in the 1987 movie Wall Street, he was touching on something true but qualified. What he said was: ‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,’ by which he meant that greed is a pure energy that ‘captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.’
Greed, in all of its forms, he said — ‘greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.’
This is true, but greed is also like skipping a queue or cheating in your exam: If everybody does it, the ‘benefits’ are negated in the overall. An ‘honesty box’ in the paper shop [another redundant metaphor, but bear with me] can save you time, and experience shows that it pays for itself with even a handful of cheaters dropping in redundant foreign coins or penny washers, because some people will, for convenience, overpay. But if everybody cheats, the entire system collapses and it’s back to queuing for the till.
Something like this is what’s going to happen to the Great Reset. What Jeff and the boys have forgotten, or maybe never got to learn (because they got things too easy?) is that you can only go so far in interfering with the ecology of an economy. A little tricking around with how things work can yield huge benefits, delivering to you the lion’s share of every kind of market. But then, one anonymous day, you wake up and go about your business in the same old way, stealing a little here, grabbing a little more there. And suddenly what was beneficial 24 hours ago is now provoking a catastrophe. That’s because you’ve passed a tipping point and didn’t hear the click on the line. Instead of escalating and increasing, in the manner you’ve become used to, everything is twisting, inverting, imploding. Greed is good, yes, so long as it’s just you, and maybe a few more. When the entire landscape is dominated by greed, it just destroys everything. This prognosis hangs over everything to do with Covid, climate change, bargain basement corporate tax rates — you name it.
I didn’t read that in a book, I learned it in the school of hard knocks. I don’t think Jeff has ever been.
FRIDAY
Those filling station queues in the US, thanks to their new brilliant President, have made me all nostalgic for the 1970s. Back in the summer of ’79, there being no PUP (petrol unavailability payment?) in those days, I landed a job as a petrol pump attendant in Smiths’ garage near the Merrion Gates in south Dublin. Actually, this was exactly 42 years ago this week. The money wasn’t great (about £40 a week) but it was the best going, so I showed up for the evening shift on what turned out to be the first day of a serious nationwide fuel shortage arising from the Iranian Revolution. Lots of garages had run out and there were huge queues at anyplace with remaining stocks. Smiths had just filled their tanks, so the queue was back to St Vincent’s Hospital when I showed up to clock on. I was supposed to have a chaperone to show me the ropes but he very wisely decided to throw in his cards, so I got to jump in the deep end of the tank. I’m not sure if there was a governmental diktat (there were no Varadkars in those days) but garage policy at least was to give a fiver’s worth to everyone who queued up — maybe a little over five gallons, or about 25 litres — something like €30 worth in today’s money, or half a tankful. The manager explained the takings system, which involved intermittently counting the cash and dropping it via a pipe into an underground safe. Then everybody else left and I was on my own with the queue until, in theory, midnight.
People were prepared to cut off their arms and give them to me for an extra fiver’s worth: ‘Gimme a tenner’s worth and I’ll give you ten for yourself!’ For a while — I swear! — I held out, insisting on the official policy, but people were literally pleading with me on their bended knees and the queue was growing longer and longer. Accepting a generous tip with grace was actually a time-saving necessity.
Soon, grown men with tears in their eyes were shoving twenty-spots into my pockets. This went on for six hours, until the scheduled closing time, when the queue was still way past Vincent’s. I continued, because the alternative would have involved being strangled with a pump hose. As the time approached 2am, the queue had shrunk back to the railway gates and the flow of joiners had slowed down. I ran back to the end of the queue, waited for the next vehicle to join the queue, and, when it did, told the driver we were closed. He started to cry, so I made a deal: If he stood there at the end of the queue and stopped anyone else joining, I would serve him as my last customer of the night. He agreed.
It was only when I had closed the pumps that I was able to think about counting the money. My pockets were bulging with legal tender. I had no idea how much I had taken in and only the faintest idea how to total up the night’s usage as per the pumps. I did a rough tot of what I had sold of each category of fuel and took a stab at separating my tips from the company’s money. I added 50 quid to the company pile just to be on the safe side, counted out the amount from my swollen pockets, rolled it up and shoved it down into the safe. At the time, £100 a week was a solid wage, but I had at least £500 left over. I stuck another £50 into the hole and left a note saying I wouldn’t be back.
I expected them to call me, but they didn’t, so I assume I cheated myself, though I haven’t the faintest clue by how much. Those were the days. We shall see their likes again real soon.