Punctuality is for sycophants and underdogs

These days the only people who arrive on time want something from you. Punctuality is for lapdogs, underdogs, sycophants, subordinates and real estate agents. It’s a surrender to fear.

“I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date!” Only white rabbits like me dread tardiness and believe that to be early is to be on time. That’s because punctuality is a heritable trait, and my father was scrupulously punctual. “What’s the enemy say?” was his way of asking the time. Evelyn Waugh wrote: “Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”

But I say lateness is hubris. An insult administered with minutes instead of words.

And it’s often used to flaunt rank. The star enters last, every time. It is gratifying to note that many of the great perpetrators of lateness as a power move have nothing else. Lateness is their only strategy, a bluff with nothing behind it.

When Vladimir Putin kept Angela Merkel waiting in a mirrored antechamber for three hours, I recognised it straight away as the self-aggrandising stunt of a man whose nukes had corroded and were sweating dangerously in their silos. I said to myself: “This is the type of idiot whose flagship will be sunk by a drone built in a men’s shed.”

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Ukrainian tinkerers had drowned the Moskva. Lateness is the same type of fake bigness as the booming voice of the Wizard of Oz. A desperate swing at importance.

In pre-industrial times, before the industrialisation of time itself, days weren’t divided into increments as they are now, and temporal arrangements were a lot more approximate, generally referencing the sun or moon, and time wore a different face.

The woman I spend all my time with would have been happy in the Bronze Age, before clocks and the concept of being “on time”. She wears a watch as a sort of wicked joke, occasionally rolling her wrist and checking it to laugh at its naivety. When we go out to dinner, I’m always freshly shaved and first out the door. I wait in the car until she meanders out of the house smelling gorgeous. By then I’m running my fingers impatiently through my stubble. And it’s not being kept waiting that riles me, as much as being late.