He hadn’t needed camaraderie at the Sentinel. When he became editor there, the feeling had been of strength exerted; to stop the absurd construction of a bypass around Margate and Ramsgate, the main contract for which – this had been the decisive scoop – was tendered for by the mayor’s brother-in-law. Or to shame some corporate owners into sprucing up the dirty nursing home in Shottendane, partly with the recurring headline ‘Grottendane’. Or to keep alive (by means of a weekly column) the idea of the Isle of Thanet, which a millennium ago had stood 500 yards out to sea with Margate and Ramsgate on its shoulders but was now joined to the mainland by silt and the A28.

That had been regional journalism at its best, making an unbroken line from a Dark Age proto-journalist called the Venerable Bede to the newsroom of the Margate Sentinel. They’d deliberated for weeks about what to name the column. Planet Thanet. Isle See You on Thanet. In the end, when the deadline was upon them, he’d played a captain’s stroke: Thanets for All the Memories. Even Max would have been pleased with that one.

But what was such strength as he had left being exerted for here? Criminal Immigrant stories, Mucky Teachers, Bungling Bureaucrats, anecdotes of the Feckless Underclass. It was for money, that’s what he was working for, and the promise of regular money to come – a promise he’d realized was all-important in the days after his first child was actually born.

He’d then seen his situation with a new starkness: that all the good reporters left the Sentinel for the nationals, that his staff had been shaved and squeezed and pared from sixty down to eight. That if someone was going to try to ride out the storm it couldn’t now be him. That it was time to get out.

There were plenty of others here who’d made the same retreat from the dying regionals to central London: Ian had been editor of the Wigan Herald, Mike of the Yorkshire Mirror, Rich of the Penzance Gazette. Now they all worked for the Beast, an army of generals all simply—

Max interrupted his thoughts. ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you still moping about having to do one rota without any real work?’

Jeremy shrugged exaggeratedly. ‘You know. Just lacing up my boots.’ And indeed, that was what he was doing: just physically making the movements that did the work, filling his mind with it to push out whatever he might be thinking or feeling for himself. Typing in his password, ReadAllAbout!t, opening PagePlanner and InCopy, checking which pages had already been drawn.