The Late Bomber Webb. Part one

.
Something funny happened to me today… I was almost, accidentally....... on time for work.  Imagine that?

You see I have a thing about punctuality.  You might say I'm somewhat anal about it -  that's what Mrs Ed reckons, anyway. For the most part of my adult life I have always, with very few exceptions, made it my utmost challenge, my life's work, my calling..… to be late. 
 
It is probably something I inherited from my father.  Other people get left summer mansions, vintage cars, stocks and bonds, perhaps even a carefully wrapped Kruger Rand or two… but I was bequeathed a 'being late' fetish.

 Dad was totally dedicated to the ‘Lateness’ cause.  In fact, if I think about it, when he  moved our entire family out from UK to Zambia all those years ago, supposedly for a more exciting lifestyle, it was more likely his effort to avoid the yawn-saturated, Anglo-European tradition of clock watching. 

He was probably annoyed at the time. With the queen.  Can you blame him?  Having  been the proud inventor, so far as records show, of the term 'Fashionably Late' he was surely expecting a knighthood, or at least a few baubles from HRH's crown jewels stock, but received neither.  This broke his heart. He had worked tirelessly at his craft for years and finally had 'being late' down to a fine art.  Dad would always make a spectacular (albeit late) entrance, sweeping into the meeting / party / funeral / army intake office with such confidence and panache, that people would immediately start apologizing for the fact that they had (quite rudely) arrived before him. 

I have to admit, I haven't got it THAT right yet.  I probably would have been ok if I had inherited the full 'How to be Admired for Being Tardy' package, which couples the desire to be late with enough charisma to carry it off. But I am sadly lacking in the latter.

 So whilst I have no recollection of anyone ever asking my father why he was late (excepting of course my rolling-pin brandishing mother and once, just once, my sister  and she can be excused, after - all, brides can sometimes behave quite oddly on their wedding days, can't they?), it seems that people actually notice when I don't arrive on time.

But don't worry. I'm not bothered that people always look at their watches in a tut tut fashion when I walk in. In fact I even get a crooked little smile on my face when I hear the crackled yet no less exasperated announcement “This is the absolutely LAST last call. Would passenger T'ED please, please, PLEASE report to the check in desk?”  at the airport. 

The only thing that gets to me is when people see my being late as a weakness.  A social handicap. A shortage in punctuality DNA.  It's almost as if they actually think I COULDN'T  be on time if I wanted to. 

Which of course I could.
 
If I wanted to.

Some people even get sympathetic. I walk into a meeting the usual ten minutes after due time and they give me that 'tilt the head sideways like a spaniel' look, smiling all sweet and doe-eyed as if I've announced the loss of a favourite aunt.  I have even had my hand-squeezed in lateness-sympathy once. Which would have been alright if the fellow hadn't been 7 foot 4 with vice-grips for fingers.

Worse yet is when folks feel they can beat me at my own game.  They go to great pains personalising their 'guilt-edged' (spelling error intended) invitations, so that the T'Ed family's requested arrival time is ½ an hour earlier than everyone else's.

This is flirting with disaster, of course.  Because if we just happen to arrive 25 minutes late (according to the time we have been given) we end up being there before anyone else.  Have you ever experienced that?  It's a nightmare!

You can't just waltz in and say 'Hi everyone, sorry but the dog ate the cat and the traffic was bad and there was a tidal wave and the car wouldn't start etc etc' as you ease through the smiling crowd to the drinks cart and/or buffet table.  No.  Not at all.  You have to stand facing the door and greet everyone as they arrive.  You have to remember names… and introduce your wife… and remember your wife's name….

So then you think you are on to the people trying this ploy, and you start adding half an hour onto their suggested time… Which doesn't work because they have actually stopped adjusting your invitations because they remembered what happened last time they gave the T'Ed family an extra 30 minutes access to the buffet table….  So you end up arriving over an hour late, and then the food is finished….

But I digress.  I was talking about this morning wasn't I?  As I said, it was quite a surprise to me when, as I was walking out the back door,  I looked at my watch and saw that I would probably get to work on time. 

“This can't be right,” I thought, mentally working through my schedule to see if I had perhaps forgotten something important. But no. Everything in order.
 
Of course I wasn't worried.  I like to arrive at the office on time every now and then, if only to see the shock on everyone's face when I walk in.

So I  slammed the car into gear and reversed out, narrowly missing Mrs Ed's Yorkshire terrier. “One day I'll get it right,” I mused as I stopped outside to close the gate. Then I noticed that the kitchen window was open, and walked back in to close that too.

Which was a good thing, seeing that someone had left the milk out of the fridge. As I was putting it back I realized that the plastic tub of leftovers from last century was STILL sitting on the second shelf… with something far more radioactive than Mrs Ed's bean soup growing quite voraciously out of it.
 
In an effort to save my family from a bout of potentially fatal food poisoning I scraped it into the afore-mentioned dog's bowl, and chucked the plastic tub into the sink… a bit of a mistake because it was full of rather greasy dishwater which slopped over the side, splashing my shirt front. Grabbing a cleanish one from the laundry pile turned out to be a blessing in disguise though, as I saw that case for the rather-late-for-return DVD was sitting on the ironing board.
 
So I grabbed that and went to the machine to eject the disc, which meant scrambling behind the cupboard to unplug the iron and plug in the DVD player.  With its newfound return to power the dvd continued playing from where Mrs Ed had switched it off the night before (apparently I had dozed off) so I was fortunate enough to see how the hero had actually managed his escape from the warlike (yet somehow rather attractive) tribe of Women of the Avocado Jungle, AND (when the dvd ended and the tv automatically flipped back to normal channels) see the short piece on morning tv about how people who eat a strict tofu diet live a lot longer (though I did wonder why they would want to).

  Just as I was about to leave, the phone rang and I had quite a nice chat with my brother in law who I hadn't seen for a while, and after we had caught up with various rugby and cricket views and opinions he mentioned that he had driven past our house three times that morning, and wondered why our car was still parked outside with the door wide open and the engine running.  I called him back a minute or twelve later and he was kind enough to give me and my fuel-can a lift to the petrol station and back home again, so I wasn't much later than usual for work….

Perhaps I’ll be on time someday next week... 

But only if I really, really want to be ....