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216 | denis beckett<br />
Big damn difference between those two.<br />
I blinked a bit, woke up, and reclaimed my magazine. Don<br />
obligingly stayed on but now under the guise “associate editor”,<br />
publishing shorthand for “person who has uses but does not<br />
claim any pay.”<br />
Soon, never mind that once again there didn’t seem to be<br />
much pay around the place, Don didn’t need any pay. He had<br />
done a remarkable thing. He created a paid lecture circuit to<br />
plug his radical free-enterprise philosophy.<br />
The convention had been that for journos and academics<br />
a bit of speech-making was an honour; you got a free lunch<br />
and a presentation tie and considered yourself esteemed.<br />
Don, at thirty, somersaulted convention. He promoted himself<br />
unabashedly and got companies to pay him – “as much for a<br />
half-hour as I got in a month at Frontline”, he enjoyed saying –<br />
to hear his eulogy to free enterprise. The Speakers association<br />
owes him a statue. (Sadly it will be a statue of a 32-year-old.<br />
Don’s car, with hired driver, slipped off a mountain pass on his<br />
way to a speech in the Drakensberg.)<br />
The first thing Don did as associate editor was much more<br />
valuable to me than anything he’d done as editor. He read my<br />
story on the car breaking down and said “run it in the next<br />
edition”. I was scandalised. a respectable editor did not publish<br />
his own picture. a respectable editor did not announce his own<br />
awards. a respectable editor certainly did not inflict readers<br />
with what would be 30 pages of his own family’s holiday tale.<br />
Don fought his case with fury, and enlisted NomaV, and then<br />
rachel by long distance, and I became disrespectable.<br />
Don then did an edit job, a thing he did in Olympic class. He’d<br />
take my a4 pages, copy them onto the middle of a big a3, and<br />
draw lines, in different colours. He needed the colours because<br />
he could have 200 observations on the page. One might be a<br />
single letter, “parallel” ringed in green with a line to a green<br />
“l”; one might be a thousand-word argument on why a line or<br />
paragraph should be cut or amplified or changed.<br />
The car story appeared in april 1990. I knew, quietly, that
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