running interference for him, made an urgent appointment to come in and see Howie Dosson with my unburied treasure in the morning.
*
A year ago, the paper joined the exodus from Fleet Street and moved into a speculative office-retail development south of the river into which has been crammed all the apparatus of a post-Wapping world where everything runs faster, does more, has a longer battery life and costs less. Air that hums and 7-Eleven lighting; trees that arrived in vans, delivered horizontally; escalators that glide noiselessly towards sylvan snacking areas where cashless payment systems wait to disgorge chicken-tikka-mayo-mint, Twix, Bio yoghurt (contains Simplesse), Filtafresh coffee. Elevated pedways. Perspex modules rising like bubbles. Water pleating down treated walls. Laminate signs with subsurface graphics. Pro-Tekt travertine floors.
And on the main editorial floor, only more of the same: whiteness and work-stations, complex information networks and database systems connected together by wires and modems; half-litre bottles of Evian thrumming cleanly in unison. And – eeriest of all – the stillness; the hospital hush, invaded only by the ambient tap and click, the sound of the new newspaper office working.
‘Mornin’, Dust,’ Des on Zone Red F (for ‘front’) Security said as the glass doors whispered closed behind me. ‘Chalky’ White, ‘Nobby’ Clark, ‘Spokey’ Wheeler, ‘Happy’ Day, ‘Dusty’ Miller. The names of yeoman England. Names that have gone the way of butts of sack and the closed-shop and the nine-hour lunch. Des is the only person left alive who calls me this.
‘Know what they say, don’tcha?’ he called after me, as I fed mycomputer card into the turnstile post, not releasing it until I experienced that second of sensuous electronic suck or tug. ‘We’re practically looking at the world being linked by a fibresphere of almost incalculable capacity and efficiency. These new erbium-doped amplifiers will flash information of any size between machines at lightning speed. An ultimate realisable capacity of 75,000 gigahertz apparently, with an exponential rise in mips and terraflops and available bandwidths.’
As the escalator wafted me skywards through the atrium, I tried to decide whether this meant that even Des – good old nig-nog hating, leftie-baiting, council house-owning, queer-bashing Des – had gone native, and discovered irony. Then I stole a look back at him in his designer coop-cum-scullery – the electric kettle with its calcium scabbing, the packets of Hobnobs and coconut creams, the ballpoint secured to the visitors’ book with string and a yellow goitre of sticky tape, the marble counter stained to the colour of the back of his underpants by roll-your-owns and puddled coffee, the industrially soiled serge of his brown-with-ochre-trim livery – and decided: probably not.
‘Newsplex’ a fluorescent plexiglass sign says over the office entrance. It is in the same cosmic blue and the same stylised letters as the signs that hang over the (mostly untenanted) retail units on the lower levels. (So far the only items you can buy there are Nepalese fire lions, ‘Bo Bangles’, scented candles and forty varieties of nut.)
I watched a light on the motion detector glow red and the video camera turn silently on its mount asathy on reception depressed the concealed button to admit me to work. (Like sikhs and their turbans and men wearing shorts at their desks in summer,athy, a rap artist with a building reputation in the clubs, has received special permission to use the reverse-K on her identity patch in this way. ‘I like it,’ she told me the one time I brought it up, ‘because it’s more like, Hey, get out of my face. You know?’). As usual, I braced myselffor an electrostatic shock from the anodised aluminium doorhandle in the shape of a cornucopia, and as usual I failed to get one.
Howie Dosson was watching golf. The vertical blinds around his
*
A year ago, the paper joined the exodus from Fleet Street and moved into a speculative office-retail development south of the river into which has been crammed all the apparatus of a post-Wapping world where everything runs faster, does more, has a longer battery life and costs less. Air that hums and 7-Eleven lighting; trees that arrived in vans, delivered horizontally; escalators that glide noiselessly towards sylvan snacking areas where cashless payment systems wait to disgorge chicken-tikka-mayo-mint, Twix, Bio yoghurt (contains Simplesse), Filtafresh coffee. Elevated pedways. Perspex modules rising like bubbles. Water pleating down treated walls. Laminate signs with subsurface graphics. Pro-Tekt travertine floors.
And on the main editorial floor, only more of the same: whiteness and work-stations, complex information networks and database systems connected together by wires and modems; half-litre bottles of Evian thrumming cleanly in unison. And – eeriest of all – the stillness; the hospital hush, invaded only by the ambient tap and click, the sound of the new newspaper office working.
‘Mornin’, Dust,’ Des on Zone Red F (for ‘front’) Security said as the glass doors whispered closed behind me. ‘Chalky’ White, ‘Nobby’ Clark, ‘Spokey’ Wheeler, ‘Happy’ Day, ‘Dusty’ Miller. The names of yeoman England. Names that have gone the way of butts of sack and the closed-shop and the nine-hour lunch. Des is the only person left alive who calls me this.
‘Know what they say, don’tcha?’ he called after me, as I fed mycomputer card into the turnstile post, not releasing it until I experienced that second of sensuous electronic suck or tug. ‘We’re practically looking at the world being linked by a fibresphere of almost incalculable capacity and efficiency. These new erbium-doped amplifiers will flash information of any size between machines at lightning speed. An ultimate realisable capacity of 75,000 gigahertz apparently, with an exponential rise in mips and terraflops and available bandwidths.’
As the escalator wafted me skywards through the atrium, I tried to decide whether this meant that even Des – good old nig-nog hating, leftie-baiting, council house-owning, queer-bashing Des – had gone native, and discovered irony. Then I stole a look back at him in his designer coop-cum-scullery – the electric kettle with its calcium scabbing, the packets of Hobnobs and coconut creams, the ballpoint secured to the visitors’ book with string and a yellow goitre of sticky tape, the marble counter stained to the colour of the back of his underpants by roll-your-owns and puddled coffee, the industrially soiled serge of his brown-with-ochre-trim livery – and decided: probably not.
‘Newsplex’ a fluorescent plexiglass sign says over the office entrance. It is in the same cosmic blue and the same stylised letters as the signs that hang over the (mostly untenanted) retail units on the lower levels. (So far the only items you can buy there are Nepalese fire lions, ‘Bo Bangles’, scented candles and forty varieties of nut.)
I watched a light on the motion detector glow red and the video camera turn silently on its mount asathy on reception depressed the concealed button to admit me to work. (Like sikhs and their turbans and men wearing shorts at their desks in summer,athy, a rap artist with a building reputation in the clubs, has received special permission to use the reverse-K on her identity patch in this way. ‘I like it,’ she told me the one time I brought it up, ‘because it’s more like, Hey, get out of my face. You know?’). As usual, I braced myselffor an electrostatic shock from the anodised aluminium doorhandle in the shape of a cornucopia, and as usual I failed to get one.
Howie Dosson was watching golf. The vertical blinds around his
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