On January 9 1995, a gormless 25-year-old in a bad suit started work at the Financial Times. My preparation had been a degrading four-month training course in a dead former seaside resort, where I woke up each morning feeling dumber than the day before, but work was worse. The building’s windows didn’t open. Canteen lunch was revolting. When darkness fell in mid-afternoon, I realised that some adults never experienced sunlight on winter weekdays.
The work seemed dull and incomprehensible, yet the two poor sods babysitting me were still bashing on their plastic keyboards at 7pm, when the newspaper “went to bed”. We didn’t have a website then.
I trekked home that evening sensing I’d chosen the wrong employer. I did leave in 1998, crushed by the tedium of writing the daily currencies report, but I drifted back in 2002. This week is my 30th anniversary at the FT. To see how the paper had changed, I went to the British Library to find the edition of January 9 1995.