RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

200 | denis beckett
their symphony of piano-like levers, fingers in the works once
or twice to disentangle typebars, couple of dabs of tip-ex and
there you are. Sign it, lick the sticky bit and close the envelope,
write an address, and the marvellous Minister of everything
else, rachel Browne, would take it away, stamp it, and post it
on her rounds to the bank.
rachel, like all her predecessors, often said I should make
copies. I said yeah, yeah, don’t worry, I will, where necessary.
Which would not include a tiny note saying, “Sorry chap, no
hurt intended, I’ll come and see you” .
If that sounds simplistic/imbecilic, I remind you that not
long ago most people didn’t think of keeping copies of personal
letters. Businesses kept letters; I kept money letters, contract
letters. The Johnny letter was to a guy with a gripe. That wasn’t
business, to me. To rachel, it was. She saw the address, she
knew the gist, she opened the envelope, photocopied the letter,
and sent it on, saying nought to me.
a month later, Johnson hadn’t replied. I repeated my offer,
same bang-it-out, same single sheet. rachel repeated her
intervention, and quietly passed two letters to andy.
Johnson never replied. We met in court – in, ironically,
blazing publicity. The Buthelezi case, meaning-laden, came and
went semi-noticed. The Johnson case, meaning-free, had fresh
pics every day of me entering court, me leaving court, Johnson
entering court, Johnson leaving court, and a full range of the
smatterings called “highlights”, such as my counsel, Martin
Goldblatt, saying that Johnson was “no Damon runyon” , and
me saying that his column, Height Street Diary, was “wacky” .
Of course, the news came out all wrong. a person who
watches headlines would assume that a vicious nut this Beckett
must be, walking around calling people “depraved” . Depraved
is a hairy term. We accepted that it was hairy. No dispute. If I
tell you “Joe is depraved”, just like that, you wonder what foul
disgusting things does Joe do.
But … here we had a foreign correspondent lambasting the
South african press’s adjectives on the manifold occasions