Blogadoon - bibulous scruff

June 13th - June 19th 2005

Sunday Nuptials
Saturday Bits
Friday Crises
Thursday Shame Street
Wednesday Snapped up
Tuesday The future is fat
Monday Gaylord

Saturday 18th June 2005

Some of the stuff I'd be writing about if I had time:

Barbara Amiel (of all people) defends Michael Jackson
We heart Doctor Who
All change at the Sunday Telegraph
The case of the gay police horse
When is a cyber sabre not a cyber sabre?

Friday 17th June 2005

Wedding tomorrow; holiday begins four days later - it's been one damn thing after another chez Blogadoon.

Find passport. Renew passport. Source suit. Re-source suit. Buy suit. Experience shirt crisis. Haircut. Buy suitcase. Take entire wardrobe to launderette. Consider washing up. Source camera. Buy camera. Spare memory for camera. Spare battery for camera. Learn to use damn camera. Banjax work rotation to be one week in hand. Clean suede shoes. Worry. Worry a little more.

Damned hard work these holidays.

Thursday 16th June 2005

My first visit to Fleet Street was in the early seventies, when I worked in advertising, and we were taken on a guided tour of...was it The Daily Mirror?

Those were the days when every newspaper office had a factory in the basement, churning out newspapers by the lorry-load - and journalists knew that the edition was on time because the whole building started to vibrate when the presses rolled. And, sure enough, around 9pm, we were taken onto the editorial floor to watch the pencils chattering in the souvenir mugs.

My next major involvement with the newspaper industry was in the mid-Eighties when I stood on the picket lines at Wapping (not from any sense of direct political involvement - my boyfriend lived just across the road and it seemed a shame to miss it.)

The move to Wapping (theirs, not mine) marked the beginning of the slow wave of change whose apogee was marked by Murdoch's presence at yesterday's service at St Brides to mark the departure of the last major news organisation from the Street that is Fleet.

(Ironically enough for a tabloid magnate, Murdoch read from chapter 44 of Ecclesiasticus, beginning: "Let us now praise famous men...")

Reuters is translating itself, somewhat late in the day, to the marbled malls of Canary Wharf: an environment (as I have cause to know) that's about as far removed from the bibulous scruff of The Street of Shame as it's possible to get.So I never will get to move in the legendary pub-based culture of Fleet Street. Which is a shame, because I think I'd have managed it rather well.