None gave him so much as a glance. They were leaning into their screens, racing, racing, always racing to be first in the world. ‘Peanut butter contains cancer-causing fungus’ – ‘Shocking pictures: Law students forced to fund degrees by stripping online’ – ‘Yew were always on my mind: the tree that looks like ELVIS.’

He was lucky, he thought, that he’d been born early enough for the print edition to see him through to retirement. Some friend of his wife’s had asked whether he could arrange work experience for her teenage son, who wanted to be a journalist. He’d prevaricated, sort of agreed to look into it, and done nothing, out of equal parts apathy and protectiveness. But really he should show the boy and his mother the state of those who wrote for BeastOnline: young skin made pasty by lack of sunlight, dulled gazes, lank hair, stress-related acne and forearms that cramped with repetitive strain injury as they lifted the Maltesers, crisps, chocolate biscuits and tea that kept the onliners alive and awake while they ruined their eyes, their health and their profession. Office legend had it that if you stood outside the BeastOnline toilets at any time of day or night you would hear the sound of weeping.

It made Jeremy want to tell them that they were still childless and re-trainable and not yet inescapably committed to this life. For him, his two daughters were like hostages – beloved, all-important hostages – held against his continued compliance. Particularly the elder one, Elsa – who was already a teenager but whom he could somehow still picture most vividly at about four or five, when her hair had been a brighter, purer hue of blonde and every feature of hers that was strangely his but not his own had enslaved him with love. She especially was a beautiful little blonde hostage, whose power to condemn him to work he accepted absolutely. With the younger one, Jenny, it was somehow less complicated and less intense; she was simply another hostage, of course also adored, backing up the first.

But even if he warned this teenage candidate to stay away before he ended up trapped in it and having paranoid thoughts about women in burqas, what good would it really do? Every kid thought he’d be the Editor one day. He himself hadn’t believed in the shackles until he was wearing them.

He walked on, past the onliners and their overseers, who were huddled around a screen and peering at a photo of the environment minister posing on a beach in skimpy Speedos. One was saying, ‘Is that a wink? Is he winking? Oh, he’s going to regret that.’

Beyond them, the noise grew louder and more diffuse as the space opened up. The whole of BeastOnline occupied just one outlying arm of the newsroom.