Deadlines

The Economist’s obituaries editor has posted a beautifully written account of her week. Much of the entries amount to meditations on aspects of mortality, but the one entry that strayed from that theme was my favourite. Wednesday is press day at The Economist, and the pressure is on:

The windows would not open anyway, even if I tried. They are sealed shut, and covered now with plastic film to stop them shattering in explosions. The air conditioning, which works badly, is meant to remove the desire to open them. I suppose it does. But office mythology tells how one hot-headed editor threw his typewriter through the glass; and one glorious day the north wind blew so hard that the panes behind me burst open with a noise like Armageddon and a hundred copies of the International Herald Tribune, carefully piled by date, flew out like rag-birds over London.

On Wednesdays, a prisoner as in Plato’s cave, I turn my back on that possibility. I renounce Green Park, even in its spring dress. I try not to notice, from other windows, the blue of the sky and the wooded haze of the hill at Hampstead, where home is. Fellow-prisoners on the 12th floor send “sunset alerts” as the sun smokes in extraordinary crimsons and purples over Ealing; I glance, and get on subbing.

My world contracts to a layout, a line-length, a spell-check and a story of somewhere else, where I try to imagine I have been. Sometimes the television connects me to breaking news (or the late night football) in yet another sphere. The world I do not enter is the one beyond the blinds. That far-too-bright reality is the one I must not waste my time on. “Don’t look out of the window!” cried an Irish teacher at my primary school, whacking my arm with a ruler as I dreamed of escaping over the high holly hedges and the walls. She left me wondering defiantly what windows were for.

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