cardboard Union Jack hats and tin ‘Stuff the Jubilee’ buttons. Both sold well, sometimes to the same customers.
The current office was not quite suitable. When the Comet was rehoused in the pyramid he would put up in London Docklands, things would be better arranged. That was in years to come. Leech already owned the site but the technology that would be housed there had not yet developed. The processes which would destroy the Fleet Street of hot-metal stirred inside the serpent’s egg, tentatively poking the shell.
His memory was perfect, from the Isle of Dogs to this moment. The paths of the future were clear, too. Nothing was set in stone but the tendencies were definite.
His jaws worked, grinding. No one remarked on the habit any more. He unlocked the lacquered box on his desk and took out four sets of file cards, lining them up as perfect stacks.
Amphlett, Dixon, Martin, Yeo.
These four - boys of seventeen or eighteen - were his children. If capable of human fondness, he was genuinely attached to them. Already, their lives were complicated and intertwined. Soon, a decision would be made. One must be separated and exalted above the rest. Four sharp, bright little lights. So much potential.
BOOK
1
OFFERINGS
‘Capra may have suffered from what would be described in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes as “the impostor phenomenon”, the fear common to many high achievers that their success is actually based on a fraud. Another psychologist who studied the phenomenon, Joan Harvey, has said that the sufferer also had the “obsessive fear that sooner or later some humiliating failure would reveal his secret and unmask him as a fraud. Some very famous people have suffered from the feeling all their lives, despite their obvious abilities.” In such people, “because each success is experienced either as a fluke, or as the result of Herculean efforts, a pattern of self-doubt, rather than self-confidence, develops,” and each success actually intensifies those feelings of fraudulence...
‘“First-generation professionals are very prone to feeling like impostors,” Harvey noted. “When people perceive themselves as having risen above their roots, it can evoke deep anxieties in them about separation. Unconsciously, they equate success with betraying their loyalties to their family.”
‘“Consciously,” she explained, those who suffer from the impostor phenomenon, “fear failure, a fear they keep secret. Unconsciously, they fear success.”’
JOSEPH MCBRIDE, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success
1
NEW YEAR'S EVE, 1992-1993
S he never had luck with this holiday. Over years, she’d dutifully endured disappointing parties and hoarse evenings in open-late pubs. The time she got it together to invite friends round, flu struck; she’d lain down an hour before guests arrived, shuddering uncontrollably in a backless dress, then forced herself to ignore the symptoms until past midnight. Last year, heavily pregnant, she’d stayed in watching TV, her mother plumped next to her on the too-small sofa. Now, here she was again: in the wars.
While Neil Martin was x-rayed, Sally loitered in the hospital corridor still decorated with tinsel and holly. A teenager with cobweb skirts hung on the phone, nibbling a dummy as she explained to an exasperated parent.
Neil probably wasn’t badly injured but the nurse wanted him to have a tetanus jab. A skull fracture or even concussion were unlikely; the head x-rays were just to be on the safe side.
Casualty offered all human life. An angry policeman and a merely fed-up lawyer argued over a youth who’d broken an ankle writing-off a stolen car A rave-goer with dental braces and a Mongol scalp-lock had swallowed party pills which her friend said ‘looked like smarties’. A fatherly man sat quiet, hand wrapped in a red tea-towel after a mishap with a Christmas present, an electric knife. A bored Asian had been stabbed. Plus there were relatives,
The current office was not quite suitable. When the Comet was rehoused in the pyramid he would put up in London Docklands, things would be better arranged. That was in years to come. Leech already owned the site but the technology that would be housed there had not yet developed. The processes which would destroy the Fleet Street of hot-metal stirred inside the serpent’s egg, tentatively poking the shell.
His memory was perfect, from the Isle of Dogs to this moment. The paths of the future were clear, too. Nothing was set in stone but the tendencies were definite.
His jaws worked, grinding. No one remarked on the habit any more. He unlocked the lacquered box on his desk and took out four sets of file cards, lining them up as perfect stacks.
Amphlett, Dixon, Martin, Yeo.
These four - boys of seventeen or eighteen - were his children. If capable of human fondness, he was genuinely attached to them. Already, their lives were complicated and intertwined. Soon, a decision would be made. One must be separated and exalted above the rest. Four sharp, bright little lights. So much potential.
BOOK
1
OFFERINGS
‘Capra may have suffered from what would be described in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes as “the impostor phenomenon”, the fear common to many high achievers that their success is actually based on a fraud. Another psychologist who studied the phenomenon, Joan Harvey, has said that the sufferer also had the “obsessive fear that sooner or later some humiliating failure would reveal his secret and unmask him as a fraud. Some very famous people have suffered from the feeling all their lives, despite their obvious abilities.” In such people, “because each success is experienced either as a fluke, or as the result of Herculean efforts, a pattern of self-doubt, rather than self-confidence, develops,” and each success actually intensifies those feelings of fraudulence...
‘“First-generation professionals are very prone to feeling like impostors,” Harvey noted. “When people perceive themselves as having risen above their roots, it can evoke deep anxieties in them about separation. Unconsciously, they equate success with betraying their loyalties to their family.”
‘“Consciously,” she explained, those who suffer from the impostor phenomenon, “fear failure, a fear they keep secret. Unconsciously, they fear success.”’
JOSEPH MCBRIDE, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success
1
NEW YEAR'S EVE, 1992-1993
S he never had luck with this holiday. Over years, she’d dutifully endured disappointing parties and hoarse evenings in open-late pubs. The time she got it together to invite friends round, flu struck; she’d lain down an hour before guests arrived, shuddering uncontrollably in a backless dress, then forced herself to ignore the symptoms until past midnight. Last year, heavily pregnant, she’d stayed in watching TV, her mother plumped next to her on the too-small sofa. Now, here she was again: in the wars.
While Neil Martin was x-rayed, Sally loitered in the hospital corridor still decorated with tinsel and holly. A teenager with cobweb skirts hung on the phone, nibbling a dummy as she explained to an exasperated parent.
Neil probably wasn’t badly injured but the nurse wanted him to have a tetanus jab. A skull fracture or even concussion were unlikely; the head x-rays were just to be on the safe side.
Casualty offered all human life. An angry policeman and a merely fed-up lawyer argued over a youth who’d broken an ankle writing-off a stolen car A rave-goer with dental braces and a Mongol scalp-lock had swallowed party pills which her friend said ‘looked like smarties’. A fatherly man sat quiet, hand wrapped in a red tea-towel after a mishap with a Christmas present, an electric knife. A bored Asian had been stabbed. Plus there were relatives,
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