The Evening Standard, chronicler of the nation’s capital since 1827, is closing down this week. OK, every bit of that sentence was slightly wrong. It’s not closing down – it’s going weekly. And it didn’t exactly chronicle London’s events in the sense that it would have been any use to a historian; it was always more about giving the gist. But still, you get the gist.
I worked there in the mid-90s, and remember the first time they let me do a feature. It was: The First Sunny Day of the Year. I had to go out with a photographer and badger strangers – were they, or were they not, enjoying the nice weather? It was an absolute trial by fire, the most inane imaginable inquiry, the living definition of a platitude, a question to which there was only one sane answer. I was wearing these rubbish shoes made of denim and nails, and one of the nails was poking into my heel, so I was walking around like the Little Mermaid, stabbed on every step, with blood running down the back of the shoe. The photographer suggested helpfully that maybe next time I should wear different shoes, because I was frightening people – but to be real, I felt like Martha Gellhorn, and also, a photographer talked to me.
