How times change
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending the Lit & Phil in Newcastle with my mother where we spent an evening with David Haldane, world-renowned cartoonist. He’s just started a new gig (at the age of 70!) for The Observer.
He outlined how technology had changed over the years: at the start his cartoons would be driven to the train station by his wife, taken on the last train to London, where it would then be taken by courier to the offices of the newspaper or magazine. Then, when fax machines came in, you weren’t sure that what you were sending would actually go to the right place, so sometimes people would be looking all around the place for things he’d sent through.
Much more recently, he mentioned how, with a cut-off date of 21:30, he’d been asked 10 minutes beforehand to redo a cartoon. He obliged, sent it through digitally — and by the time he’d tidied up his stuff and gone downstairs, there was his cartoon on the front page of the “tomorrow’s newspaper front pages” section of the TV news!
How times change.