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time in the kitchen to be entirely au fait with its contents, but she was an observant woman. He scanned the post and stuffed the one envelope addressed to him in his briefcase and took that too. Now he had to get over to Bath, do some shopping and with luck he could still be at Cecily’s before six.
    Shopping accomplished, Derek sat fuming, stuck in traffic on the London Road.
Worse, he was stuck just outside a filthy pub from whose door an alarming-looking clientele trickled like a toxic spillage out onto the pavement corner. They seemed to have dressed themselves out of dog baskets, with a bit of sleeve and cardigan here and two or three bits of trouser there, rather than complete garments, although their black boots, clinging up to mid-shin, looked whole enough. Most of them looked as if they might have been rolling in mud and were eyeing Derek as if they believed that he had pushed them in it. Despising himself, he locked the car doors. The
PM
programme chirruped on about league tables, incompetent headteachers and falling standards. Still exasperated but feeling more secure, he fished out the letter he had brought and opened it without noticing the postmark.
    Suddenly the world changed colour. It was reelingly good news. The letter informed him that he had been shortlisted for the post of Director of Education and Cultural Services for the City of Bath and North-West Wansdyke. Derek’s heart started to bang in his throat as he recalled the details of his application. He had applied for the job knowing two things: one, that he was a rank outsider and two, that he could write a damn good application when he tried. Although it had been five weeks since he had written it, it was easy to bring to mind what he had put because they were the things he had once believed in and had been bluffing about for years. He had referred to the need to balance consolidation with change, traditional methods with new thinking, and standards with opportunities; he had sprinkled about like hundreds and thousands notions such as diversity, enrichment, accountability, consultation, visionary leadership and fiscal prudence. The result had been a very digestible confection entitled ‘Citizen 2001: Prioritising Educational and Cultural Needs for Bath and North-West Wansdyke into the New Millennium’. He could have been applying to be Secretary of State. He had played up his ‘role’ in the region as a professional educator with ‘solid, hands-on experience’, signalling his readiness to ‘move into the strategic management sphere’. As a ‘key figure’ in ‘culture and the arts’, he had cited a number of small arts charities on whose boards he had rather grudgingly served. He had exaggerated both the scope and scale of two consultancies in the Midlands he had done eight years previously and had described his influence as an ‘advisor’ to a now disbanded theatre-in-education company in terms that were close to fraudulent. He had mentioned a book he was writing about arts education in England and Wales since the 1988 Act, omitting to observe that he had not actually started it, but had done most of the research and lost his notes when his hard disc crashed.
    It was not so much an application as a visa, his passport out of his collapsing job in south Bristol and into lovely, elegant Bath (he dismissed the pub crowd as atypical) and the career he deserved. He belonged in Bath. He certainly did not belong in Bristol, and he couldn’t stand much more of it. He had to get out. He
had
to get the job. He looked at the letter again. It gave no date for the interview, but said he would be contacted in the coming week. Meanwhile, the appointments subcommittee looked forward to the opportunity of hearing an outline of his vision for the authority’s education and cultural provision for the next five years. That would be a doddle. Would he please note that the committee would be taking a special interest in his plans for museums services,