Novelist and former literary journalist Annalena, 72, lives in Gloucestershire with her husband, the writer Ian McEwan I wanted to be a poet but sensibly took a job that paid me to work with words.
I started out reporting on garden fêtes for local papers and ended up falling in love with journalism. When I began in newspapers, the technology – ink, paper and cumbersome presses – would have been familiar to Caxton.
Newspaper culture less so. Newsrooms in the 1970s were filled with mavericks frowning over expenses forms after two-bottle lunches, printers were kings, and the pubs of Fleet Street were way stations on a nightly bacchanal.
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