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.
It was never completely clear which Londoners the paper had in mind. The comment pages were full of people who lived in the Cotswolds and knew exactly what should be done about Kosovo. The Friday magazine, meanwhile, had some imagined reader who had all the money in the world, and spent it all on the gee-gees. He or she thought hard about Canaletto, but also about black leggings.
The critics would deliver their reviews on wafer-thin parchment, typed on an actual typewriter, and completely lose it if you mentioned a computer, but it didn’t matter, because they’d been on a boat with Judy Garland. Film critic Alexander Walker was actually right about computers; in the earliest days of autocorrect, his mention of the 19th-century governor of New Mexico, Lew Wallace, got changed to Lewd Walleye. Walker didn’t understand spellcheck, unfortunately, and tried to get the subeditor fired for what he was absolutely certain was a malicious, if monumentally weird, act.
Before the turn of the century, the paper was genuinely bipartisan, so you might have a mad front page about the scandal of an immigrant receiving HIV treatment on the NHS (it was unclear what would have counted as not-a-scandal, in this scenario – not treating the immigrant?), but on the very next page, a columnist would be arguing that violent protest was good, actually, because that’s what Jesus would do. Before London got a mayor, there wasn’t even any boring political administration to write about, so the Standard felt like a national paper that unaccountably came out four times a day, and covered whatever it wanted.
Everyone in the office was so bracingly rude to each other, it was like a sport. Someone once asked me what the north was like, and I said, “I don’t know – I’m from Wandsworth,” and he said, “Sorry, all regional accents sound the same to me.” Once I wore a tartan skirt, and the fashion editor said, “It’s fashionable, but it’s like you don’t know you’re doing it, like someone who comes out of a coma speaking German.” We never took offence because we were drunk all day long. The rest of Fleet Street had phased that out more than a decade before, but somehow the Standard didn’t get the memo. It smelled of fresh tobacco, because you could smoke at your desk. The Daily Mail was upstairs and that smelled of sweat and cortisol, because they were always shouting at each other. Sometimes, we went out for a pint of thanksgiving just because we didn’t work at the Mail.
It all changed years ago: the culture professionalised, and editorially it lurched to the right. It can arguably be held responsible for the gross spectacle of Boris Johnson, having swung behind his mayoral bid. The time to mourn the paper as a bringer of carefree chaos would have been about 2002. Nevertheless, rest in peace, Evening Standard, you maniac.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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