The chief paused with pleasure as a vision of the drunken Dyson appeared to him, then said, ‘You can’t even imagine how it was then. Some of the old guard were still wearing green visors and arm garters, and they used to bore me shitless about how they’d caught the tail end of the real Fleet Street, when copy still came in by fucking telegram. But being on a paper then was like being in the best gentleman’s club in the world. Now you’re expected to fucking work for a living.’

Jeremy said, ‘If you can get the work,’ and the chief’s pleasure ended. Will wanted to keep him talking, so he asked, ‘But what I’ve never understood is how you used to do the subbing without a computer. So just, how did you make things fit?’

Jeremy looked to the chief, deferring, but the chief seemed to have lost interest. He looked across Jeremy and out of the window, past which sunlit countryside was unspooling like coloured celluloid past a shutter. Jeremy said, ‘You had to know the width of all the letters and then add them up to fit the space. But actually I remember when I was starting out at the Sentinel, when you used to have carbons – a sheet of carbon paper you’d put behind the page you were typing on to make the carbon copy – and I—’

The chief interrupted. ‘That’s why when you copy someone into an email, which is all you know, it says “cc” in the box, or why – what you young fucks don’t realize is that all these names actually came from somewhere. When we spike stories, you used to have an actual spike. When the paper’s off stone, there actually used to be a fucking great big perfectly flat stone that you actually laid out the pages on.’

He stopped – and Jeremy, after giving him a moment, finished his anecdote: ‘So, when I was starting out at the Sentinel, I couldn’t get the hang of lining up the carbon with the normal paper, and I remember thinking, “I’ll never make it in journalism; it’s just too technical for me.”’

Will laughed, but the chief said, ‘It’s all over, the newspaper era. What a big national paper used to be… Every paper used to have its own library, can you imagine that? And that was recent enough to be in my time. In the war, the Beast built Spitfires. Think about that. Out of tins sent in by the readers. And now they have to make extra money by selling us sandwiches for lunch. Jez and I were around for the end of real printing, with actual type, and you’ll be around to see the end of print altogether. And it’ll go fast, Will. I mean, John Dyson, what he was to us…’

Jeremy said: ‘It’s the end of the old late shift.’