The Evangelizers Have Taken Over The Asylum. #newsrw - A Few Thoughts FWIW

"The Dinosaurs are still roaming the planet, but now they can see the meteorite approaching" (with apologies to @brian_condon - scroll down for link to relevant Audioboo...)


It is always a bitter-sweet moment, isn’t it? The one when you realise that everyone else has finally got wind of your great big secret and no matter how loud you shout: “I told you so!” - they are just not listening.

Of course they are not; they are all too busy, playing with the wow new toy you kept telling them that they needed, way, way back in the day, back when they were all too busy, still scoffing.

Understandable. You used to be part of a pretty small, but immeasurably cool, gang who were in on something which was going to be really, really big; just maybe not quite yet. There is the camaraderie, the complicity; let’s face it, there is the darned smugness. Just you guys wait! You are going to see how right we were! You are going to have to eat your Twitter-dissing, social media scorning words.

Actually, there has been no time for apologies. Everyone is far too busy, checking in on foursquare, replying to their DMs, uploading their latest pics to Flickr. Those of us who were well in the vanguard will just have to sigh and be content with the knowledge that we did indeed predict the revolution and that everyone else is still playing catch-up, more or less.

There were hundreds of nodding heads and complicit smiles at the News Rewired conference in London on Friday when New York Times Social Media Editor Liz Heron underlined the fact that all of us brave and hardy evangelizers were finally in huge demand, from the very colleagues who had once jeered our Twitter addiction.

I glimpsed a lot of very old, or should I perhaps say, “experienced”, evangelists in the room. I was able to catch up with several friends and contacts whom I met at my own, very first social media conference in May 2009, back when I was the one staying up until the wee hours of the night before, stuffing the goodie bags.

They included the legendary Christian Payne (@Documentally – many happy returns!) Jon Gripton, then of Sky, now at the Beeb, and Laura Oliver, back then still a stalwart of journalism.co.uk, organisers of News Rewired, and since then, cleverly snapped up by a canny Guardian.

I also caught up with the beguiling but terrifyingly bright Brian Condon, broadband campaigner and co-founder of #C4CC. Brian’s lively Audioboo which captures the #newsrw energy and insight can be found here.

This conference had all the right ingredients: ideal venue at MSN HQ in SW1; great programme, top speakers, an extremely lively back channel, good sarnies and covetable stuff in the delegates’ bag – (Note to event organisers: can’t do a decent baggie? Just don’t bother?!)

It was a relief to be discussing the real challenges created by the new open media (personally, I find “social” to be a limiting term?) although there is still far too little candid discussion of real-life business models, ROI or the scary drain on resources which the monitoring & filtering of our new media cacophony inevitably occasions.

Liz Heron’s assertion that the NYT has a whole team of busy-bee editors “hand-selecting tweets” stretched my credibility. Can the NYT really afford such a luxury? Can any media organisation? There was an awful lot of cooing about what great stuff my old stomping ground, the Guardian, and the BBC are doing, social-media wise, with only a few voices on the back channel pointing out that the Scott Trust and the license fee mean neither organisation really needs to worry about the bottom line.

We did have a stimulating session on paid-for-content models which provided my personal highlight contribution of the day from François Nel. Not only did he quote Claude Lévi Strauss on reciprocity, he also showed super cute pics of his twin nephews.

It seems a tad churlish to highlight specific prezos from an overall excellent day but, in no particular order, I would like to thank the following for stimulating my aged brain: @sifter; @darrenwaters; @dougiegyro; @khaddon; @currybet; @kevglobal; @mikegoldsmith; @natelanxon; @fieldproducer; @rondiorio and @tomstandage.

Great to catch up with i.a. @GabrielleNYC @andrewgrill, to meet IRL (congrats on you know what btw!) @Sarah_Booker & to meet among some rather smart ladies: @HelenRoxburgh of @economiamag, @caroline beavon & @SallyGriffith.

There was excellent live-blogging and tweeting from the inimitable @adders and his partner-in-crime, @egrommet. The hosts, including @joelmgunter, @rmcathy @SarahMarshall3 @KTKing @peteclifton and supremo @johncthompson all made it look like a swan gliding effortlessly through the choppy waters of our noisy new media environment. As we say #Twitter: kudos.

The Evangelizers Have Taken Over The Asylum. #newsrw - A Few Thoughts FWIW

"The Dinosaurs are still roaming the planet, but now they can see the meteorite approaching" (with apologies to @brian_condon - scroll down for link to relevant Audioboo...)


It is always a bitter-sweet moment, isn’t it? The one when you realise that everyone else has finally got wind of your great big secret and no matter how loud you shout: “I told you so!” - they are just not listening.

Of course they are not; they are all too busy, playing with the wow new toy you kept telling them that they needed, way, way back in the day, back when they were all too busy, still scoffing.

Understandable. You used to be part of a pretty small, but immeasurably cool, gang who were in on something which was going to be really, really big; just maybe not quite yet. There is the camaraderie, the complicity; let’s face it, there is the darned smugness. Just you guys wait! You are going to see how right we were! You are going to have to eat your Twitter-dissing, social media scorning words.

Actually, there has been no time for apologies. Everyone is far too busy, checking in on foursquare, replying to their DMs, uploading their latest pics to Flickr. Those of us who were well in the vanguard will just have to sigh and be content with the knowledge that we did indeed predict the revolution and that everyone else is still playing catch-up, more or less.

There were hundreds of nodding heads and complicit smiles at the News Rewired conference in London on Friday when New York Times Social Media Editor Liz Heron underlined the fact that all of us brave and hardy evangelizers were finally in huge demand, from the very colleagues who had once jeered our Twitter addiction.

I glimpsed a lot of very old, or should I perhaps say, “experienced”, evangelists in the room. I was able to catch up with several friends and contacts whom I met at my own, very first social media conference in May 2009, back when I was the one staying up until the wee hours of the night before, stuffing the goodie bags.

They included the legendary Christian Payne (@Documentally – many happy returns!) Jon Gripton, then of Sky, now at the Beeb, and Laura Oliver, back then still a stalwart of journalism.co.uk, organisers of News Rewired, and since then, cleverly snapped up by a canny Guardian.

I also caught up with the beguiling but terrifyingly bright Brian Condon, broadband campaigner and co-founder of #C4CC. Brian’s lively Audioboo which captures the #newsrw energy and insight can be found here.

This conference had all the right ingredients: ideal venue at MSN HQ in SW1; great programme, top speakers, an extremely lively back channel, good sarnies and covetable stuff in the delegates’ bag – (Note to event organisers: can’t do a decent baggie? Just don’t bother?!)

It was a relief to be discussing the real challenges created by the new open media (personally, I find “social” to be a limiting term?) although there is still far too little candid discussion of real-life business models, ROI or the scary drain on resources which the monitoring & filtering of our new media cacophony inevitably occasions.

Liz Heron’s assertion that the NYT has a whole team of busy-bee editors “hand-selecting tweets” stretched my credibility. Can the NYT really afford such a luxury? Can any media organisation? There was an awful lot of cooing about what great stuff my old stomping ground, the Guardian, and the BBC are doing, social-media wise, with only a few voices on the back channel pointing out that the Scott Trust and the license fee mean neither organisation really needs to worry about the bottom line.

We did have a stimulating session on paid-for-content models which provided my personal highlight contribution of the day from François Nel. Not only did he quote Claude Lévi Strauss on reciprocity, he also showed super cute pics of his twin nephews.

It seems a tad churlish to highlight specific prezos from an overall excellent day but, in no particular order, I would like to thank the following for stimulating my aged brain: @sifter; @darrenwaters; @dougiegyro; @khaddon; @currybett; @kevglobal; @mikegoldsmith; @natelanxon; @fieldproducer; @rondiorio and @tomstandage.

Great to catch up with i.a. @GabrielleNYC @andrewgrill, to meet IRL (congrats on you know what btw!) @Sarah_Booker & to meet among some rather smart ladies: @HelenRoxburgh of @economiamag, @caroline beavon & @SallyGriffith.

There was excellent live-blogging and tweeting from the inimitable @adders and his partner-in-crime, @egrommet. The hosts, including @joelmgunter, @rmcathy @SarahMarshall3 @KTKing @peteclifton and supremo @johncthompson all made it look like a swan gliding effortlessly through the choppy waters of our noisy new media environment. As we say #Twitter: kudos.

Give The Hockney Hordes A Miss In Favour of John Keane's Powerful Political Paintings

"Figure at an Inquiry No 2" 2010
Image (c) - John Keane, Flowers Galleries, London


Are you going to the Hockney? Well, of course you are. It’s the blockbuster of the moment and jolly good fun it is too. Most of the critics seemed to love it and I have to admit that I loved it too.

The majority of the pictures on show are of one of my own favourite parts of the world: the Yorkshire Wolds, just inland from Bridlington where Hockney lives these days, in what used to be called the East Riding. It is a subtly beguiling, still virtually undiscovered, stunning swathe of proper English countryside. I urge you to go.

I am not so sure I urge you to go to the Royal Academy however. Spectacular as the humongous landscapes and ingenious i-Pad drawings are, it is almost impossible to get a proper look at them, given the number of people the Academy seems determined to squish into the show. In many cases, you are simply not able to get far enough away from the bigger pictures to appreciate them. Besides, advance tickets are already reportedly sold out until March.

I do, however, urge you to go to another show, just around the corner from the RA, in Cork Street. Flowers Gallery is staging the first solo show for three years of paintings by John Keane (b.1954), the sometimes controversial and always thought-provoking British artist who first came to international attention with his appointment as the Imperial War Museum’s official artist during the Gulf War.

I have already written on this forum about Keane’s arresting 2006 series entitled “Guantanamerica”. The new exhibition, “Scratching the Surface, Joining the Dots” which runs until February 11th, seems to me to mark a stylistic development for the always experimental Keane but it retains his markedly political themes.

Many of the new paintings refer to recent events in the Middle East, with a particularly striking series of images of Tony Blair’s appearance in front of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War (see above). I was particularly struck by a rather smaller canvas, depicting just the former prime minister’s hands. Next time you see Tony on telly, just keep an eye on them. Those very mobile hands speak volumes.

The images of Tony being interrogated also strike a theme which is topical and current, as we continue – and will carry on for many months to come - watching the great and the good of Fleet Street and its putative environs giving their own evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press.

But Keane has always been a particularly prescient artist. More than a dozen years ago, his 1999 series entitled: “Making a Killing” featured ever so slightly grotesque portraits of Rupert Murdoch, Diana, Princess of Wales and Charles Saatchi.

The title of the series was always a bit too bald for me but it did not detract in any way from the power of the images, many of them abstracted from extremely familiar television shots, such as the doe-eyed Diana of the infamous “three-in-the-marriage” Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.

Keane’s latest works are more powerful still, with the commentary all the more potent for its subtlety. I had to stare at one canvas for ages before I realised why the scene looked so disturbingly familiar. Finally, it hit me: it was a still from the “Rules of Engagement” video of a 2007 US helicopter attack in Baghdad which killed 12 people, including two Reuters staffers. The video was, of course, controversially released to the world by Wikileaks in 2010.

Keane’s two images from the video, which remains at the centre of the global debate on censorship, freedom of expression and the internet are entitled “Hindsight”. Whatever your own stance on the latter debate, I sincerely hope you can find the time to view this important and stimulating exhibition.

On the Media - Wikileaks & Journalism: “The Julian Show” rolls on.... (& on)

Good afternoon, good evening and good night!

Once upon a time, I, too, had my own little perch in the daily news conference at the Guardian. I would squat inelegantly in the corner of a windowsill, overlooking the Farringdon Road, nervously awaiting my own 90 seconds of impatient attention, while some of the biggest beasts of Fleet Street – Roger Alton, Alan Rusbridger – bestrode the pokey editor’s office.

So it was difficult not to feel a rush of nostalgia when the paper’s deputy editor Ian Katz lifted the lid on some of the excitement engendered by the Guardian’s recent entanglement with Wikileaks. Katz was on the panel at the Frontline Club’s first On the Media event of 2011, entitled “Wikileaks – holding up a mirror to journalism”. The event was covered, live, in admirable detail, by the erudite Brian Condon.

It was an often heated discussion, with the Guardian accused at one stage of: “playing Julian Assange and essentially betraying him”. Read the much cited Vanity Fair piece here.

But precisely there, with Julian Assange, lies the rub. Katz himself admitted that Julian: “is a colourful character” and just what, exactly, was the Guardian supposed to do, when their collaborator himself became the story?

For David Aaronovitch, also on the panel, Assange is “a phenomenon of the modern era”. He is itinerant, arrogant, aloof, cool. “Throw in a Swedish sex story […] he was never not going to be interesting”. Indeed.

And here, for me, is where “The Julian Show” has now, sadly, obscured so many of the very significant implications of the Wikileaks phenomenon: for free speech, for accountability and transparency and for best possible journalistic practice. “The Julian Show” is the very model of the indolent, personality-based, sleb-led journalism that so many newspapers and on-line media outlets now prefer to practice.

After all, “The Julian Show” has got simply everything. The enigmatic, persecuted protagonist, the thorny, likely trumped-up, law suit, the photogenic range of international locations. Why, it’s even got the obligatory stately home and a plucky yet truculent heiress to boot now. Someone, somewhere, must be polishing off the screenplay as I write.



Here are some of my own casting suggestions – for Julian, Jason Isaacs (who plays Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter - above); Kelsey Grammer for Vaughan Smith; Andrew Lincoln for Ian Katz; for Bianca, either Salma Hayek or Monica Belluci would do.

And isn’t it so much easier to dissect the individual rather than examine the issue? Discuss, say, Kate Middleton’s incipient anorexia; not the likely expense of her nuptials in the current climate, or the sheer anachronism of her fiancé’s elevated status in a 21st century democracy. The examples are endless.

Whatever your perspective: Wikileaks presents a watershed for journalism. It has heralded a sea change which was addressed, albeit briefly, during the Frontline event. Gavin MacFadyean, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, raised the worrying spectre of the sheer scale of the tsunami of information unleashed by ever-accelerating technology.

How, with mainstream media reduced to increasingly impoverished resources, can these data dumps be effectively mediated and republished coherently? How can we be sure that the stories which need to be published get the appropriate space and attention they deserve? How do you choose between the old-fashioned “splash” and the almost afterthought “basement”, when both contain vital, new information?

As Katz explained, the sheer volume of material processed by the Guardian – who were apparently able to second between 30 and 40 reporters to deal with the Wikileaks data tsunami – often meant that stories which, at a different juncture, would have brazenly commanded the front page, only merited a few down-page paragraphs. How disturbing is that?

Personally, I loved Aaronovitch’s idea of an “analyst caste” – experts who understand how to read this data and process information in vast quantities. But he acknowledged that it is costly to develop these skills and suggested it might just put an end to investigative journalism as we know it.

Certainly, without the ever mysterious resources of the Scott Trust or perhaps an impecunious army of hungry interns, data dump journalism presents huge challenges to the main stream media and is likely to continue to do so.

According to McFadyean, there are still millions of documents to see the light of day, including significant material from whistleblowers in China. It seems the weird fog of Wikileaks will not be clearing any time soon.

Meantime, the Julian Show rolls on. Tune in for the next cliff-hanger on February 7th, when Julian returns to court in London for his extradition hearing. I have heard a rumour that he has been allowed to stay the Frontline Club. Well, Julian, I can highly recommend it.

Attack of the 800 foot Amazons - Can Prime Time Podophilia really flog Footware?

A statuesque Afro-haired model, in a shimmering, low cut, fuschia pink jump suit, straddles an enormous phallus, legs akimbo. With a complicit, sly smile, she rises elegantly to her full height, towering, head and shoulders above the high rise building on a shimmeringly familiar city skyline. Cut to a titian-haired temptress, supine in a diaphanous gown, gazing up, directly into the camera as she seductively raises one knee and the gown slowly starts to fall open.

Do I have your attention yet? Just click here for a glimpse of the clip I describe above – although perhaps you should be warned? It won’t actually take you straight to a wicked website, devoted to the singular charms of gigantic women and their puny male prey – although there are plenty of those out there – as ever, I’ve researched this post thoroughly, on your behalf, of course.

It is not a slice of slick macrophiliac porn. It is, in fact, the latest television advert for good old Clarks shoes – founded 1825 by brothers James and Cyrus Clark, in the tiny town of Street in Somerset, southwest England. And, it seems, still going strong.

The clip was directed by Scott Lyon for agency AMV BBDO and was first aired in the UK at the end of September. Obviously, it grabbed my attention as the super-size models are seen stalking around the Central business district of my native Hong Kong and I am thrilled to wallow in nostalgic recognition any time the ad airs.

Yet, once I had successfully identified every street and every skyscraper, the ad began to trouble me. Why would such a staid old shoe company be so overtly referencing such a controversial artistic trope to push its new Autumn/Winter range of boots and shoes? It is not, of course, the first time that Clarks have pushed the envelope with its advertising. Remember the jaunty “Act your shoe size, not your age” campaigns, orchestrated by iconic agency St Luke’s in the late 1990s?

Neither is it the first appearance of giant women in an advertising campaign. Lee Jeans and Burger King are just two companies who have recently used huge women or tiny little men to push their products. Right now, on London Underground, the lengthy, fish-netted legs of the stars of musical Chicago are wrapped around a selection of city landmarks such as London Bridge.


The forbidding figure of the Amazon or Giantess recurs in Greek, Roman and Norse mythology and has been around in both fine and popular art and literature for centuries. In one classic children’s book, even Lewis Carroll had poor Alice temporarily take on enormous proportions, while the giantess in popular culture may well have reached her apotheosis in 1958’s schlock-horror classic “Attack of the 50 foot woman”.

Super-sized females remain a potent theme in much contemporary art. Among my personal favourites is the German-born British artist Julia Fullerton-Batten, most notably in her sensitive and thought-provoking “Teenage Stories” series. Check out “Milk Bottle”, “Chewing Gum” “Airport” and “Red Dress in City".

Nevertheless, any internet search on this subject throws up an extraordinary number of borderline pornographic sites for enthusiasts. Macrophilia is, of course, a paraphilia; one closely related to podophilia or foot fetishism. All of which lends the Clarks advert an even edgier undertone, making me wonder quite what kind of message the company – or rather, the agency – is trying to convey?

Perhaps I had better rush out and buy myself a pair of those black suede boots, last seen striding across Queen’s Road Central, behind the Star Ferry and stepping onto Hong Kong’s old colonial City Hall? (Model name: Loch Erin £120.00 online).
I’ll let you know how I get on...

Sushi, Shiraz and Tsunamis - (A Personal Take on) The James Cameron Memorial Lecture 2010

Ever wondered what happens to old journalists? Do they simply put down their pens, slip silently away from the still active herd and head off quietly in the general direction of the elephants’ graveyard? Don't be daft. Of course they don’t.

Journalists never retire. They may well retreat to the country cottage but, rest assured, there is always the odd op-ed piece to write, the odd talk to give, the odd colleagues’ lunch or an apposite lecture to attend.

There were certainly plenty of very distinguished journalists gathered at City University in London on the evening of 22nd September for the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture – not least the two prize winners, Africa specialist Michela Wrong and pioneering film maker Michael Cockerell (who made an amusing and remarkably self-effacing speech about Cameron, the doyen of foreign correspondents, himself).

The lower rows of the lecture theatre were filled to bursting with the balding pates and silver locks of scores of Britain’s finest scribes and broadcasters. The upper tiers were equally full: of bright-eyed, shiny City journalism students, live-blogging on nifty net-books, filming the proceedings, tweeting apace.

But where were the in-betweenies? All the senior, if not quite yet venerable, experienced, maybe middle aged journalists who must form the bulwark of this country’s most respected print and broadcast organisations? Surely they can’t all have been “let go” or – perish the thought – moved into financial PR? They were certainly conspicuous by their absence.

I was hoping for some sort of explanation from our orator for the evening, Leonard Downie of the Washington Post but alas, his lecture - entitled “The New News” - threw up rather more questions than answers.

Careers in journalism simply don’t come any more glittering than Downie’s – and yet last night in London, he appeared to have nothing fresh or insightful to say about our “new journalistic era”. Instead, we had plenty of tired, old clichés, including that evocative but hoary chestnut of the “tsunami of economic, technological and social change [washing] over the news media”.

In Downie’s view, unsurprisingly, nasty, thieving aggregators like the Huffington Post are “parasites”; the blogosphere and social networks are “chaotic”. He also railed rather predictably against the cynical appeal of “news presented as entertainment and entertainment presented as news”.

For the rest, we were treated to an exhaustive enumeration of various new hyper-local news sites across America and a list of equally novel, not-for-profit, investigative news organisations – many of which were apparently staffed by professional journalists who have been made redundant. It sounded for all the world like the one-size-fits-all speech that Downie, in his newish role as Professor at the Walter Kronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, must be giving on a regular basis. You can download a copy of the lecture from the City website here.

I really do wish I could take heart from Downie’s enthusiastic endorsement of nascent Stateside not-for-profit journalism initiatives, such as ProPublica and the new national Investigative News Network. He also espouses an apparently steadfast conviction that scores of wealthy philanthropists are just waiting in the wings for an opportunity to invest in some mythical new, non-celebrity, transparent and accountable news service.

Yet somehow I just can’t see some rich Brit forking out to found a 21st century successor to the Scott Trust while persistent hostility towards the BBC licence fee exposes widespread reluctance among the British viewing public to underwrite credible and verifiable journalism.

In her rather shorter acceptance speech, Michela Wrong spoke movingly about former colleagues who are now no longer able to make a reasonable living from journalism. Well, I was moved and I am one of them. She suggested that, although protracted, this turbulent "period of adjustment" would eventually end. After the lecture, as London's journalistic élite queued for the sushi and the Shiraz, the consensus was that Wrong had said more in her five minutes than Downie had managed in fifty.

The Importance of Being Earnest - Why Journalists Need to Have the Courage of their Convictions

The Nightmare on Downing Street last week – albeit relatively short-lived – sadly succeeded in pushing a far more serious crisis much further down the news agenda. As I write, oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, contaminating miles and miles of highly sensitive natural habitats and threatening the livelihoods of millions of fishermen and other human inhabitants of the US Gulf Coast states, all the way from Texas to Florida.

Given the absence to date of any real concrete developments, this environmental catastrophe is currently struggling to hold international attention. Attempts by British oil giant BP have so far proved to be woefully unsuccessful in plugging the leak which followed the 20th April explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig which claimed the lives of 11 BP workers.

I have been following the saga with more than my usual news junkie’s interest. It is not that I am a diehard environmentalist, although, of course, nobody likes to hear about dead dolphins. I have actually been charting the fortunes and the reputation of BP since I spent several months working on their corporate communications - a few years ago now.

There, I’ve said it. So much for all my juvenile ambitions of “shining a light into the world’s darkest corners”. It is true. My little freelance copy-writing agency once accepted a series of commissions from a local media agency whose key, actually sole, client was BP. The work was straightforward, the remuneration was nicely above market rates and, most importantly, my byline was not on any of it.

So, I spent a fair few months conducting phoners with BP operatives in places as far-flung as Azerbaijan, Indonesia and Mozambique. I interviewed many of the senior bods, including current chief exec Tony Hayward and COO Doug Suttles. Both, I must add, were cooperative, informative and utterly charming.

I also learned a lot – about how exactly you go about extracting tar from pesky tar sands, about how best to go about resettling entire villages, particularly if the elders are objecting; about how best to protect your precious pipeline from Islamic terrorists.

Yet finally, I had to jack it all in. Now I would love to be able to say that it was my conscience which made me relinquish this role – as the tiniest of cogs in the gargantuan BP PR machine. Sadly, the truth is more prosaic: I fell out with the intermediaries, the media agency, who were slack, disorganised and very tardy payers to boot.

Yet, I was relieved to give up polishing copy which I knew in my heart was 90 per cent promotional guff. I have no doubt that BP takes the welfare of its staff and other key CSR issues as seriously as the next global corporate behemoth. I just didn’t want to have a hand in crafting, editing or disseminating anything that smacked, even ever so slightly, of propaganda.

I don’t mean to come across as unnecessarily noble. In fact, I am pretty much with Dr Johnson in the “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” camp. But for me, at least, there are limits, as I discovered during my short stint with BP.

Times is tough for journalists, particularly of the old school. Print and broadcast media are both broad-based pyramids and for every editor of the Economist, there are myriad lesser hacks, running around trying to make an honest buck – however, wherever and whenever we can.

So why have I been so surprised to see that so many of my former colleagues have jumped the wall into the PR and corporate communications world? At a drinks party a few years ago, I was struck dumb, as scores of my former Financial Times comrades handed over business cards, proclaiming their elevation to head of media relations - or some such - at one swanky bank after the other.

Yet maybe these were the smart guys? The ones who got to 35 and realised they had a mortgage and school fees to pay. So they wisely stopped mooning round the newsroom, stuck on NUJ wages, waiting in vain to be appointed editor. Instead they bravely took the plunge, surrended to the blandishments and accepted the twinkly shilling of the selfsame evil corporations they had spent the previous decade attempting to unnerve?

In one of those twists of serendipity, the BP head of media currently popping up all over the place to apologise for the Deepwater Horizon fiasco is none other than former FT editor, Andrew Gowers, who, I recall, sat at the far end of my second floor office in Bracken House, many many moons ago now.

I don’t envy Andrew or, indeed, any of my other mates who now spend long hours, burnishing brand reputations, sorting out corporate cock-ups and spinning finely crafted yarns to their erstwhile journo chums, who are, sadly, more credulous and indolent these days.

I’m just ever so slightly thankful that I have been able to dust down my languages and do a bit of translating. After all, the psycho spaniels’ vets bills (not to mention all of my other, if rather less terrifying, expenses) have got to be paid somehow…