Another day, another board meeting, another round of budget cuts.

The week hadn’t started well. I’d spent Monday at the funeral of an old colleague whose liver had disgracefully betrayed him. He was an old school regional daily sub, from the days of marking up triple carbons in pencil and pasting together paragraphs on copy paper with Gloy glue. His claim to fame was that he’d once confronted an idiot, fast-track whiz-kid sent to us from a management training scheme and kicked him cleanly in the bollocks. The whole newsroom stood and applauded as the tosser who is now the editor of a national newspaper slid slowly beneath his desk.