Monthly archives: September 2011

Some­times in life you do things that really make you feel like you’ve ‘arrived’. A new job with sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter wages, for exam­ple. Or, as recently hap­pened to me, an actual invi­ta­tion to cen­tral Lon­don to actu­ally offi­cially do some actual proper work.

Okay, so on this occa­sion I paid for the invi­ta­tion, rather than being paid for my work, but it doesn’t dimin­ish that gen­tle sense, Dick Whittington-like, of ‘hav­ing arrived’.

But before I get ahead of myself: In order to ‘have arrived’, one has to actu­ally arrive.

Pro­fes­sional arrival is a fine art, I think it’s widely acknowl­edged. I’ve been through enough job inter­views to realise that the opti­mum arrival time is T-minus seven minutes.

At T-minus ten, the per­son who is set to receive you will look at the clock and think, god, what am I going to do with this total stranger for ten min­utes? I hate them!

T-minus five looks a bit cal­cu­lated, a bit neat, and you also run the risk of hav­ing to rush in the event of any out-of-order lifts or miss­ing stair­cases or what­ever. No, no. T-minus seven. With all unex­pected obsta­cles nego­ti­ated, you can stroll in and com­mence ‘hav­ing arrived’.

So the real art, then, with such a tar­get decided, is arriv­ing at the arrival; how do you make sure you’re seven min­utes early?

Here’s the route I was required to take yes­ter­day (trav­el­ling from west to east):

That is, 0.08 miles (459 feet) of prime British pave­ment, tak­ing in Eros, flash­ing lights, shows, piz­zazz, every­thing that great old town has to offer. Here’s the route I took to ensure arrival at T-minus seven:

An entire mile of British pave­ment, some prime, some sub-prime.

To be hon­est, the open­ing gam­bit was neces­si­tated by that most obstruc­tive of obsta­cles: Pic­cadilly Cir­cus. It’s a con­fus­ing place to nav­i­gate at the best of times, even with­out tak­ing into account my pol­icy of refus­ing to look up like a tourist — which is a bit awk­ward, as that’s where all the road signs are. When I emerged from the tube sta­tion, I took a gam­ble, and lost: I turned the wrong way.

This wrong even­tu­ally righted, I zeroed in on the build­ing I was sup­posed to be doing my ‘arriv­ing’ at, and iden­ti­fied its dis­creet dou­ble doors. Right. I sit­u­ated myself at a Pret across the street from those doors, and com­menced eat­ing a sand­wich and drink­ing a smoothie, peer­ing sus­pi­ciously for any tell-tale signs of anything.

Upon sand­wich com­ple­tion, I departed the Pret and pro­ceeded to a nearby Spar to buy some Polos. Then I walked round the block, stop­ping off only to check out the back door of the build­ing I was sup­posed to be doing my ‘arriv­ing’ at. Brief panic that this was in fact the cor­rect entrance, as there was a group of peo­ple hang­ing around out­side look­ing expec­tant. No, no. Wrong street. Onwards.

I passed the front doors again, but I was still at T-minus twelve, so I con­tin­ued past them and walked for 2.5 min­utes, before turn­ing and walk­ing back for 2.5 min­utes. I pushed the doors and walked in, with all pos­si­ble calm and poise, pre­cisely seven min­utes early.

I think it’s fine to con­clude from this a gen­eral rule: what hap­pens at T-minus eight out is nobody’s busi­ness but your own.

j