‘For the interview there was him and a few of the other top guys from that time: James Rose, Tom Griffiths, who got sacked from the Strumpet for putting the Editor’s byline on a story about a rollerskating dog, Mark Rennie, big Andy Pyke, fat Andy, the Fat Controller as once was, whose son Clint turned out to be an idiot and had to get a job making things up for the Lark. They were all there.

‘So we get stuck in, and not pints, it was before people started wanting booze to taste good as well as get them pissed, so it was all this disgusting sour red wine. I’m still just a freshly hatched little punk, so I puke my guts out under the table. Nobody notices. Tom’s staggering around like he’s got Parkinson’s, which he does now, the poor bastard. I don’t know what year it is, let alone what time or how long till edition, when Dyson slaps a hand on my chest like this’ – the chief splayed his fingers where those others had been thirty years before – ‘holding himself up. And he says’ – the chief put on a stiff toffish voice – ‘“I wouldn’t take this job if I were you; it’s driving me to a crack-up. But I’m sure you sub like an angel, so if you do want the bloody thing, you can have it.” I said yes, and they went in to lay out the paper.’

He and Jeremy were misty with nostalgia. ‘Imagine that now. You probably sent in your CV and did tests and spoke to HR, didn’t you, pipsqueak?’

Will bobbed his head. ‘I didn’t, but all the trainees did.’ He’d never seen the chief so freed of his usual violent mania, and he took the opportunity to ingratiate himself. ‘Did it really use to be like that?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Jeremy, wanting to explain the surprise that had gathered in him over the years about how different things had become. ‘Everything’s so corporate now, but I caught the tail end of the real Fleet Street. The guy I trained under, Nick Robertson, used to insist, actually insist, that everyone kept a four-pack under their desk for the afternoon. And that was after a couple at lunch. He finally went—’

But the past was welling up in the chief, and it spilt out of him. ‘On Fleet Street, we had a pub inside the building. You’d call down on the internal system, ask them to put a pint and a chaser on the bar – on your tab. Then pretend you were going to the loo, sprint down the stairs, neck them both, and sprint back up. Dyson once, after a few trips, sprinted up one flight less than he should have and had to get dragged out of one of the magazines for trying to make them tell him where they’d hidden his desk.’