It's quite a personal piece as it coincides with me finding out this week that I will be starting teacher training - and a whole new life - in September. And leaving the world of printing behind me.
I have been in 'the print' for about twenty five years. Although I followed my dad, and come to that my grandfather too, into the trade, it was not an obvious career choice at the time for a graduate. But I was seduced by the romance and history of printing; a proud and quirky closed world of chapels, banging-out - and journeymen. And the Gutenberg anniversary is an appropriate time to step back and reflect on just what an incredibly important part of western civilisation - and its radical opposition - printing has been for six hundred years.
But Murdoch, technology, corporate avarice and off-shoring slowly eroded all that romance. And at the same time imperceptibly I slid up the greasy pole into a job far removed from the one I signed up for. To the point that when it all went tits up last Autumn and I was laid off - I felt a sense of liberation.
I'm actually pleased that I am now spending my last few weeks in the print in a small trade house - surrounded by the smell of ink and the sound of endless banter. It's an epitaph for a love affair that is over.
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