Eight months of persistent, polite requests. One finally granted meeting. Forty-five minutes almost entirely about tomato blight.
Finally secured the off-the-record coffee meeting I have been persistently, politely requesting for close to eight months now with a genuinely senior EU official whose actual insight into an ongoing negotiation I have been covering would be, professionally speaking, genuinely valuable to my reporting, and spent close to forty-five minutes of our finally-granted meeting listening to her talk, with real, unguarded enthusiasm, almost entirely about a persistent tomato blight currently plaguing her garden back home rather than anything remotely resembling the substantive policy insight I had spent eight months patiently angling to actually obtain.
I want to be honest that my initial reaction, sitting there watching forty-five precious, hard-won minutes disappear into a genuinely detailed discussion of organic pest control methods, was something close to real frustration, a specific, familiar flavor of professional disappointment that any journalist who has ever spent months cultivating a source only to have the eventual meeting produce almost nothing directly usable will likely recognize immediately.
What I have come to understand, reflecting on the whole meeting properly this evening rather than simply filing it away as a wasted afternoon, is that today’s tomato blight conversation was probably not, in fact, wasted time at all, but rather a genuinely necessary, if considerably less efficient than I would have liked, part of the actual relationship-building this specific kind of source cultivation requires. Senior officials in genuinely sensitive positions do not typically hand over substantive, useful information to a journalist they have met exactly once, however many months of polite advance requests preceded that first actual meeting. They test, consciously or not, whether a given journalist is someone they can actually trust with more candid material eventually, and a meeting spent discussing tomato blight rather than policy substance is, I am choosing to believe, part of that specific, necessary testing process.
I think there is a genuine skill, one I am still actively developing after several years on this beat, in actually being present and genuinely engaged during exactly this kind of seemingly unproductive meeting, rather than visibly, impatiently steering every conversation back toward the substantive material I actually want, a visible impatience that I suspect would, ironically, make a source considerably less likely to ever eventually offer that substantive material voluntarily, in some future meeting, once they have actually decided they trust me enough to do so.
I asked, near the very end of our forty-five minutes, one direct, fairly specific question about the ongoing negotiation, framed as genuine, low-stakes curiosity rather than a formal interview request, and got, in response, a single, genuinely interesting piece of context I had not previously had, delivered almost as an aside on her way out the door, precisely the kind of small but real payoff that eight months of patient, low-pressure relationship building is actually designed to eventually produce, even if today’s specific yield was considerably smaller than I had hoped walking in.
I have already sent a follow-up message this evening, genuinely asking about the tomato blight’s eventual outcome rather than immediately pivoting to another substantive policy request, a small, deliberate signal that I am actually interested in her as a person rather than purely as a useful information source, which I believe, based on watching more experienced colleagues navigate this exact same kind of relationship over the years, is precisely the correct, patient strategy for eventually earning the kind of genuine trust that produces real, substantive off-the-record insight down the line.
Eight months for one meeting, forty-five minutes mostly about tomatoes, one small but genuine piece of useful context at the very end. I am choosing to file this under patient, ongoing source cultivation rather than wasted time, and I fully intend to ask about that garden again at whatever our next meeting eventually turns out to be, whenever that is.
I called a more senior colleague this evening specifically to share the whole tomato-blight saga, half expecting some gentle teasing about spending eight months of patient effort on forty-five minutes of gardening chat, and instead got a genuinely warm laugh of real recognition, a story of her own about a similarly patient, multi-month cultivation of a different senior official that produced, across their first three separate meetings, almost nothing beyond friendly small talk about the man’s adult children, before a fourth meeting, close to a year after her first request, finally produced the kind of substantive, off-the-record insight that eventually shaped one of her most significant pieces that entire year.
That story has genuinely recalibrated my own patience going into whatever comes next with this specific relationship. A year, apparently, is not even an unusually long timeline in this particular kind of source cultivation, and I think I had, without fully realizing it, been quietly expecting today’s single meeting to produce considerably more than the patient, incremental process this specific kind of trust-building genuinely requires. Tomatoes today. Something more substantive, I am choosing to believe, somewhere down this same patient road.
I am putting a note in my own calendar for roughly two months from now, a gentle reminder to reach out again, not with any specific substantive request attached, simply another low-pressure coffee invitation, continuing exactly the same patient rhythm that eight months of prior requests eventually, finally produced today’s first actual meeting. I suspect this specific relationship, like my colleague’s year-long cultivation, will take considerably longer than I would ideally prefer to yield anything genuinely substantive, and I am trying, tonight, to actually make peace with that timeline rather than quietly resenting it.
More from this author at Charline Vanhoenacker, prat.uk.