I have been thinking about halves.
The Copper Review Commission delivered its interim report this morning, and the word that appears most frequently in its thirty-four pages is “phased.” Phase 1, to be built. Phase 2, to wait. Half a tramway now; the other half when the world cooperates, or at least stops actively obstructing.
This will strike some readers as a defeat — a city that set out to build fourteen miles of modern tramway and has settled, under pressure of circumstance, for eight. The optimists will call it pragmatism. The pessimists will call it retreat. Councilman Voss, in a statement I suspect he enjoyed writing more than he will admit, called the geological survey mandate “the most important paragraph in the document.” Councilwoman Pryce, who has spent eight years fighting for a tramway that now arrives in instalments, was notably brief.
I am sympathetic to both positions, which is the columnist’s prerogative and the politician’s impossibility.
But I find myself less interested in whether the phased approach is the right answer than in the question it implies: is there wisdom in doing half of something?
We are, as a city, surrounded by halves this week.
Count Viktor Soren arrived this morning with, by all accounts, half a mandate. He is authorised to talk but not, so far as anyone knows, to concede. Sir Duncan Hale returns tomorrow with half a framework — the quiet channel exists, the agenda does not. The two men will meet, presumably, and conduct half a negotiation: bilateral in form, trilateral in substance, with the Thessarine Confederation participating through an aide whose name we are not permitted to know.
This is, the diplomatic historians assure us, how peace is made. Not in grand strokes but in increments, each one incomplete, each one dependent on the next.
I confess I find this reassuring. There is a school of thought — popular among those who have never built anything — that holds that partial measures are evidence of insufficient will. That a city, or a nation, should either commit fully or not at all. That the phased approach is the coward’s tramway.
I do not believe this. I believe that the phased approach is the honest person’s tramway. It says: here is what we can do today, with what we know, with what we have. It does not pretend that copper will be cheap tomorrow or that the earth beneath Greymoor will arrange itself to our convenience. It builds seven stations and trusts that the reasons for building the other five will become clear in time.
There is a young woman walking a postal round in the Docklands this morning with a blue notebook in her coat pocket. Maisie Hollander, twenty-four, delivered her first solo mail on Round 14 — the route that Albie Finch walked for thirty-three years, the route he knew in his feet.
She does not yet know it in her feet. She knows it in her notebook: the gates that stick, the houses that were renumbered, the cats with opinions. This is half the knowledge. The other half — the residents’ names, their worries, their shortbread preferences — will come with time, as it came to Finch, one morning at a time.
Finch gave her the map. She must earn the rest. This, too, is a phased approach.
At Ashwick Oval this evening, the Stoneflies beat the Thornbury Lancers by a single ring to draw within one point of the league leaders. Dov Marsden, who is thirty-six years old and has no business running as hard as he ran in the third quarter, orchestrated a sequence of lodge rotations that dismantled the Lancers’ marking system with the patience of a man threading a needle.
Marsden does not play as though he is in a hurry. He plays as though he has decided to complete only the phase that is in front of him and trust that the next one will present itself. I suspect this is the secret of sporting longevity, and possibly of longevity in general.
There are five rounds remaining. Three teams are separated by two points. Nothing is decided. Everything is possible.
This, I submit, is a tolerable condition.
The commission’s report contains a phrase I have not been able to put down since I read it this morning: “The commission prefers honest numbers to comfortable ones.”
This is a fine sentence. It should be embroidered on a cushion and placed in every committee room in the Municipal Chamber. Honest numbers are uncomfortable numbers. They tell you that the tramway costs more than you hoped, that the earth is more complicated than you assumed, that the workers need protection and the survey will take four months and the copper may never come down to 740.
But honest numbers are navigable numbers. You can build a plan on them. You cannot build a plan on comfortable ones, because comfortable numbers are, by definition, wrong.
Ida Pryce and Aldric Voss — who agree on almost nothing and have spent their political careers proving it — have produced a document that prefers honesty to comfort. I do not know whether their phased approach will work. I suspect they do not know either. What I know is that they have looked at the situation clearly and said: this is what we can do.
Half a tramway. Half a diplomatic channel. Half a postal round, learned from a notebook. Half a ringball title race, with five rounds to play.
The world is full of halves this morning. I find I do not mind.