back in an old stomping ground

In the summer of 1974, just after my first year at Oxford, I managed to snag a really excellent temp job for a couple of months, on the home news desk of The Times - just the kind of thing that people fight after now as interns, but I had a weekly pay packet.  In those days, The Times was on the Grays Inn Road, and I used to pass this Driving School almost every day.  It used to cause me a good deal of mirth - an Italian Driving School?  My experience of Italian drivers, the previous summer, meant that I treated whatever skills it might look to pass on with extreme scepticism.

And it's still there!  I was walking, today, from a hotel in Clerkenwell to a meeting just off Chancery Lane.  But lots of the old shops were no more - in their place, lots of enticing cafes and cake shops (you can tell that Easter is approaching) - I don't know where, these days, I would buy the apricot yogurts that were all that I lived on that summer.  

It was a terrific summer.  I was given masses of responsibility - which in those pre-Internet days, largely meant making phone calls and asking questions.  I had to call Buckingham Palace every morning and check the details that should appear in the Court Circular, and then type it up.  There was a great deal of running around the building with envelopes for people.  But there were many less routine moments.  It was a summer of IRA bombs, and one lunchtime I was left in charge of the news desk whilst all the reporters went off to the pub.  Suddenly the ticker-tape machine sprang into life: a bomb had gone off at the Tower of London ... no newsmen in sight, so I found the phone number for the pub, and sent the message that they'd better leave their pints and sandwiches and get moving ... Of course, it being The Times, we had endless bomb threats ourselves, and kept having to evacuate the building - all apart from Bernard Levin, their most famous columnist at the time, who flat-out refused.  He was dating Ariana Huffington at the time, and she occasionally drifted through, which lent an air of glamor.  It was, however, an almost all-male atmosphere - looking back, though, no one harassed me, no one hit on me, unlike so many other temp jobs before and after that one.  I suspect the news was too engrossing, in any case - not just the bombings, but this was the summer that Watergate broke and Nixon resigned - I can remember us all crowding around the news desk's one small TV to watch this ...

(and I guess the view from my old bedroom window counts as my old stomping ground, too)