TOM EATON: Goodbye to ink on thinly sliced sheets of wood
'For a species that took hundreds of thousands of years to figure out how to cook food with fire, the last hundred years have been a mind-melting rush strapped to the nose of a rocket pointed straight at What The Actual Hell'
I had hoped that my final newspaper column would be a little more poetic than this. I hadn't thought about specifics - I always assumed there would be time for that - but I had a vague plan to produce the sort of valedictory speech, full of wit and pathos, that leaves people balancing between laughter and tears. Of course, there is never time, and vague plans are not any sort of plan at all. Besides, these moments have a way of arriving all in a rush, and you only think of what to say once they're past.I suppose the first thing I should say is that this isn't my final opinion piece. But it is my last one in the print incarnation of The Times, a newspaper that you can page through and linger over and spill your coffee on. In a few weeks my colleagues and I will be plugged into the matrix, and our words, instead of being painted onto thinly-sliced wood, will become zeroes and noughts, floating about in a cosmos of content that is infinitely huge and full and yet somehow still feels em...
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