Wednesday 8 April 2009

Why Grey Cardigan should not die

Glad to see that the great Grey Cardigan, Press Gazette's columnist who views the world of journalism through the eyes of a curmudgeonly down table sub, is to set up a blog when he is made homeless by Wilmington's decision to close the monthly PG magazine and its website in its current form.
Grey Cardigan works for both. We need him at this time of turmoil in the newspaper industry. He often gets to the heart of the matter. For example, take this from Cardigan's latest column which shows what redundancy really means.

A FRIEND and former colleague of mine has just lost his job as an editor so, as you do, you keep in touch asking how the poor chap is doing – poor being the operative word since the big pay-offs went out of the window.
It turns out that he’d been down to his local JobCentre, suited and booted and carrying a briefcase, only to be confronted with the spectacle of two tramps in the queue fighting over a can of Special Brew. He tells me he stood there, just six weeks after being a man of some substance in society, and wondered where it had all gone wrong. We both agreed that it was all Johnston ‘35 per cent’ Press’s fault.
It got worse. “I’ll take anything,” he told the glassy-eyed woman behind the security screen, who was clearly already on the pop at 10.30am. “Even a driving job”.
The woman burped and laughed. “A driving job? You? You must be joking.”
“No,” he insisted. “I’ll do anything to tide me over.”
“Listen,” she said. “The last driving job we had in here was five months ago and we had over 100 applications for it. You’d have stood no chance.”
Much chastened, my man retreated to the nearest hostelry and joined the two tramps, now amicably sinking cheap cider. He’s 50 years old and has been in the trade since he left school. What on earth have we come to?

3 comments:

JTownend said...

I thought he'd be off to the Gentleman Ranters - maybe he'll turn up there too. I was pleased to see he made use of Journalism.co.uk's subbing guide the other month. I've enjoyed watching him enter blogland and several of his posts, but I'm inclined to agree with Alison Gow on the whole 'Crystal Tits' thing.

Miles said...

Yes.
Sexist shite spoiling an otherwise excellent effort.

Unknown said...

I think you rather miss the point of Mr Cardigan, you humourless lickspittles.