The Spoiler by Annalena McAfee is published on Thursday 14th April. Exclusive extracts from the book will run on the Vintage Books website every day this week, starting tomorrow!

By Tamara Sim*

 
Look at me, blogging! Who’d have thought it? In early 1997, when the Spice Girls were Number One, John Major was prime minister and the internet was a distant rumour, I was a grunt hackette, the lowliest newspaper journalist, writing Good Week/Bad Week lists for The Monitor. Remember The Monitor?

Younger readers might find it hard to believe, but there was a time in the not too distant past when ink and paper were the primary means of disseminating information, the only people who could afford mobile phones were plutocrats and drug dealers, and texts were cumbersome mediaeval manuscripts found in the posher university libraries.

What a difference fourteen years can make. Like many then, I thought predictions of the new cyberage were implausible futuristic scenarios, like time travel and silver unisex jumpsuits, dreamed up by self-pleasuring sci-fi enthusiasts. We were print and paper addicts – yes, we bought a newspaper every day! – and could not imagine a world without our regular, tactile carbon-based fix.

And if I, a forward-thinking young woman-about-town, found the internet hard to take seriously, spare a thought for those veteran journalists, irascible old folk, for whom the introduction of the electric typewriter had been an innovation too far.

Among them was Honor Tait, the distinguished foreign correspondent who had reported from many war zones, from Madrid to Berlin, Korea to Algeria, using a portable Olympia and interleaved carbon paper (remember carbon paper?) to type up her reports in triplicate. She would telegraph these stories, or phone her newsdesk and laboriously dictate them (“That’s Poland. P Papa. Full point. New par,”) down a crackling line to an irritable copytaker.

When I interviewed Honor Tait for The Monitor, it wasn’t exactly a meeting of minds – more a head-on collision ¬– but we had, as it proved, this much in common; neither of us saw the technological tidal wave coming our way.

It was a perilous era for newspapers; sales were already declining. Apart from print fetishists like ourselves, few were buying newspapers. As time passed and the internet took hold, and readers were able to get their news online for free, circulations plummeted, along with advertising. And without advertising revenue, how would newspapers survive? But, after the initial shock, some of us were quick-witted enough to grab a passing life raft – the nearest accommodating dotcom startup - climb on board and surf the wave. Of course many of the dotcoms were themselves sunk in the crash of 2000, but by then, we were web-literate survivors and we walked from the wreckage unscathed to re-establish our online lives on more stable vessels.

Which is how you find me today, blogging, tweeting my 253, 0000 followers and updating my Facebook page and MySpace site (52,000 friends to date – more readers than the average daily newspaper), during those hours once unproductively spent crafting lists for The Monitor .

Yes, the world has changed in many ways since I first met Honor Tait in 1997. Celebrity studies (my specialist field) have gained welcome respectability, reality shows and talent contests replaced dull, expensive TV shows and documentaries, Diana died, Madonna married again and divorced again, the Spice Girls went their separate ways and New Labour (remember New Labour?) came to power and then lost it.

And did I mention I wrote a book? Well, Honor Tait was involved too, but since she’s no longer around I feel at liberty to claim it as my own. All this week you can read exclusive extracts from The Spoiler on this website.

Of course the publishing industry – once the prerogative of gents in cravats and matrons in floral viscose - has changed too. These big corporations are full of thrusting young people in chic workwear, with geometric hairstyles and audacious ideas, and the business of publicity now demands more time, energy, commitment and ingenuity than the actual writing of books.

So this week will find me under the dryer in the salon of a fashionable Mayfair hairdresser, before I cross town to get my botox retouch, fish pedicure and cosmetic makeover at the hands of Random House’s Chief Stylist, in the basement spa of the publishing house’s London headquarters. There will be photoshoots (Vogue is pushing for a silver unisex jumpsuit but Bailey sees me in Givenchy), television appearances – Jeremy Kyle and Top Gear are pencilled in – and, after the launch party at a West End nightclub (Cheryl Cole and the cast of Hollyoaks are tipped to attend), there will be a national tour with readings and signings at the flagship stores of Lidls and Costcutter. It’s a punishing schedule, certainly, but if Dan Brown and Peter Mandelson (remember him?) could take the pace, then who am I to complain?

In rare moments of solitude, I find myself reflecting on Honor Tait and I wonder how she might have fared in today’s fast-moving world. Would she, given time, have saluted Skype? Fallen for Facebook? Taken to Twitter? I suspect not. She was a creature of her age, wedded to words, and it is hard to imagine her having the discipline to reduce her verbose accounts of war and famine to tweets of 140 characters. And she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes of our hectic publicity schedule. No, she’s better off out of it. Facebook status: deceased. Along with those drab old newspapers about which we were once so irrationally fixated. Remember newspapers?

*As tweeted, via hyperlink, to Annalena McAfee