Printer’s ink on my fingers and in my blood

The thrill of being the first to open a fresh newspaper, as crisp as an ironed shirt, a white shirt with thousands of minuscule black signs forming an irresistible design. Pressing your nose to the pages like you would press it to the petals of a sweet-smelling flower. The feel, the smell, the sound of those huge sheets of printed paper, complicated to hold and even more complicated to fold back to their original shape. Like an ironed shirt, once again, after you’ve worn it.

I grew up in the distant era of daily newspapers delivered at the front door or thrown over the garden gate, landing with an inimitable fat and floppy sound. The children in the house didn’t read the daily paper, but on Sundays the whole family took part in the ritual of Dividing the Papers.

Some of my most vivid childhood memories spring from this activity, fitted in after church and before lunch, with the flavours of the beef roast or chicken pie in the oven spreading from the kitchen to the living room where we all gathered. My parents bought two papers, one English and one Afrikaans, so there was enough for everyone wanting a piece. And we all did.

Pa would get first choice, of course, and he’d usually start with the sport sections, studying the pages with particular concentration if there’d been a big rugby match the previous day. Only after making sense of all the sports news would he turn to the politics and scandals on the front page. Priorities, right?

Obituaries and death notices

Meanwhile Ma would tackle the main section of whatever newspaper Pa wasn’t reading. She would devour it from the first to the last page, everything, including the ads and the classifieds, as if she had to write an exam on the contents. She had a soft spot for the obituaries and the death notices, a fascination that would only increase as she grew older. She kept studying other people’s death notices through 10 years of cancer treatment, until shortly before her own death. She would probably have loved to read her own notice.

The three children would fight over the comics sections, but some compromise was always reached before we could distract Pa from the serious sports news. We’d stretch out on our stomachs in a sunny spot on the carpet and enjoy the latest adventures of The Flintstones or Ben and Babsie’s family. (We were especially amused by Aunt Minnie with her triple chins and a nose as sharp as a knitting needle and an ugly little lap dog.)

To our delight, Ma even allowed us to read a photo story in the Afrikaans paper. Ma was not in favour of “common photo books” like Mark Condor or Ruiter in Swart (which we consumed on the sly in the neighbourhood café), but she had nothing against the photo story of a boy called Trompie and his mischievous gang, probably convincing herself that if it was in the newspaper it must have some official stamp of approval.

In those days, anything you read in the newspaper was considered true. The newspaper of your choice, that is. Other newspapers, more liberal English or foreign papers, well, that was debatable.

So I grew up with printer’s ink on my fingers (mainly from comics and photo stories), but a major shift occurred after school when I trained as a journalist, just in time to catch the tail end of the clattering typewriter era. In my first few months as a reporter at a daily newspaper, when newsrooms were messy, noisy, smoky places mainly inhabited by white males, and newspapers were still set by hand, the printer’s ink quickly spread from my fingers to my blood.

I only worked for four months, saving every cent I earned for a plane ticket to Europe, and the moment I could afford a flight I took off for a gap year. When I returned to the newsroom at the end of that year, the clattering typewriters had all been replaced by computers and a strange new silence reigned. The cigarette smoke was also getting less, along with the testosterone levels as more and more female reporters got promoted. It was the beginning of the end of an era — but I could still feel the printer’s ink flowing through my veins.

More than 40 years later a bit of that ink remains in my blood, I realised last week when I read a Substack post by Steve Scherer, a former foreign correspondent and head of a Reuters office who now drives an Uber to feed his family. My inky blood froze while reading his words, because so many of my ex-colleagues have had to find new careers after newspapers and magazines started folding all over the world.

I had a lucky escape because I began writing fiction at a very young age, clinging to freelance journalism for many years to help pay the bills, but gradually fiction became my main income. The irony is that I’d thought it would be the other way round. If my fiction career dried up, I told myself, I could always return to the modest but regular salary of a journalist.

I suppose this could be seen as a good example of life happening while you’re making other plans.

In the past decade I’ve had to watch the agonising death throes of numerous newspapers and magazines for which I used to write feature stories or interviews or columns. But at least I didn’t have to completely reinvent myself at an age when reinvention becomes increasingly difficult. I haven’t had to become an Uber driver or an ageing waitress in a local bar. Fiction saved me.

Although I wouldn’t have been able to survive on fiction, however precariously, if it hadn’t been for the lessons learned from journalism. Journalism taught me about grammar and punctuation, more than all my literary studies; it taught me to kill my darlings and never get too precious about my words, to always double-check the spelling of proper nouns, to trust experienced editors and excellent subs because they know what they’re doing. Above all, journalism taught me the discipline of deadlines, of writing at regular hours every day, not just when I feel “inspired”, because deadlines don’t wait for inspiration.

So perhaps I should say that fiction is my lifeboat, but journalism made sure the boat is seaworthy, fully inflated, equipped with the basic tools of survival.

Taste of the week

The retro taste of rolled-up pancakes, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and squirted with lemon juice, reminding me of the church bazaars of my youth, seems to go with the lost pleasure of reading a paper actually printed on paper. But the reason we’re eating pancakes this week has nothing to do with the vanishing newspapers of my childhood, and everything with where I now live.

In France everyone eats pancakes, also known as crêpes, in the first week of February, traditionally to celebrate Chandeleur (Candlemas), the day when baby Jesus was presented at the temple, 40 days after his birth at Christmas. Although France is a profoundly secular country, and the connection between Chandeleur and the eating of pancakes has become lost in the mists of time, we all still eat heaps of pancakes. In France you don’t really need a reason to eat food you love.

My French family eat their crêpes in the French way, folded in cute little triangles, but I always insist on rolling mine to form the elongated shape of my childhood pancakes.

I can never go back to those Sunday mornings with the whole family sharing the newspapers, but a few bites of rolled-up pancake can be as evocative as Proust’s madeleine. A taste that can help me recall lost time, almost feeling the pages of a disappeared newspaper between my fingers. Almost spotting the ink stains on my fingers.

Sentence of the week

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Like millions of readers, I could instantly recognise this phrase as the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I also knew that it was only the first part of a much longer sentence:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Probably one of the longest opening sentences ever produced in literature, in a novel published in 1859 and set almost a century earlier, before and during the French Revolution. And how astonishingly appropriate these words still sound in our own present period early in 2026. Even more astonishing, to me, is that until a week ago I had never read this novel from start to finish.

One of the great advantages of reading on Kindle or other electronic devices, even for die-hard paper lovers like me, is that you can download classic books for free or almost free. The bonus is that you can enlarge the page on your screen; you don’t have to punish your poor eyes trying to decipher the tiny printed words in so many classic works of literature. This is why I have recently been discovering and rediscovering age-old classics with the help of a very modern little machine. Scrolling through A Tale of Two Cities on a screen that fits in my palm – surely a whole new take on retro pleasures.

Sound of the week

Inevitably, to fit in with my nostalgic mood, it has to be the ancient sound of a stone wall being repaired, stone by stone, clink, clink, clink. Yes, the building of our patio, about which I wrote in my very first Substack post (Autumn of my content) is slowly (excruciatingly slowly) continuing. After the building team had disappeared for a seemingly endless Christmas vacation, they returned last week. I was woken by this clinking sound because the wall they are repairing is right behind my bed, but it was music to my ears.

They promised us the patio would be ready for spring. My sceptical Frenchman suspects they might mean spring next year. But hope is the thing with feathers, isn’t it?

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all.

I’m with Emily Dickenson on this one. DM

Republished from Marita van der Vyver’s Substack.