RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

212 | denis beckett
unsurprisingly, was that he would “build on the tradition”. His
first edition I couldn’t read. It was standard-form politics with
elephantiasis. an election was coming and Frontline was a mass
of pundits predicting and candidates promising, like the rest of
the press but in more words. I raised this with Don, surprising
myself that I raised it without knuckledusters. Don said yeah,
right, this was building; moving into mainstream areas and
giving readers special depth.
This didn’t work for me. We might not have been mainstream,
but we had been distinctive, and not boring. I don’t know why I
didn’t argue. I think it was sleepwalk taking over.
I pounded out Book 3. at least, I think I did. My body told me
I was working like mad, but words somehow did not appear on
paper. It was the second Book 3, for one thing, after I’d ditched
the first. Tardily did the finger strike the keyboard, mainly to
alter the last strike.
Plus I was being hauled off to see advertisers. No longer the
supplicant in a queue in the waiting room, I was now supposedly
the Distinguished editor whose presence drew senior execs to
lunch. Didn’t seem to be drawing their bookings, though, and
through a mist I wondered how after all these twists and turns
I was doing what I least wanted to do.
Plus I didn’t read the magazine whose masthead declared
me to be its Publisher and editor. Where it had become a tract
for my blinding faith in ultra-democracy it was now becoming a
tract for Don’s blinding faith in ultra-free-enterprise. Something
failed to jell, but it was through mist.
Plus the office was a different place. Don was young and
american. One day he produced two friends, who had come
to help us free of charge, how grateful we should be. These
were young americans too, and large presences in every way.
a quintessentially Suthefrican institution sounded like a
Mississippi bar and felt like a Management consultancy.
rachel, who had always taken on anything that came her way
and had never encountered a word called “complain”, became
scratchy. It was hard to be Lady High everything else with two