In May 1981, I joined The Age, where, more or less, I have stayed put. On my first night one of the news subeditors said, ‘Let’s have a drink’. Whereupon he led me away from the news desk, along the scrofulous green carpet, past the ramshackle assortment of desks and typewriters, and straight into the men’s room. Fleet Street used to have a bar, behind St Bride’s Church, called the City Golf Club, which was neither sporting nor exclusive in any way. But The Age went one better, with a late-night hostelry on the third floor of its ugly Spencer Street building that served as a drinking hole because the others were all closed by that hour.

This impromptu establishment was formally called the Locker Room (I should say it did contain lockers) or, informally, the Bog Bar, and was a sort of ante-room to the loo: a sibilant urinal shared the common wall. Its main purpose was not the release of bodily fluids, more the ingestion of alcoholic ones – an assortment of beers, cardboard-housed vino and a bottle of Bundaberg Rum for homesick Queensland subs. It was late – later still, when the party broke up – and, as the desultory gathering click-hissed its way through a few tinnies and unleashed warm Leasingham into plastic mugs, I told them that I was staying with elderly relatives and that one of them used to come home and bark like a dog. ‘Oh,’ said the chief sub, momentarily lowering his Bundy, ‘Does he lick his balls as well?’