Lucy Kellaway of The Financial Times said goodbye to her readers after 32 years with the paper.
Kellaway writes, “Instead I feel I have a relationship with an idea of the FT. That idea stands for judgment and knowledge and decency. Though it is soppy to say so, it is an idea I cling to, one that fills me with pride. Most of all the relationship is the — slightly lopsided — one I have with readers. You know me (or the side I choose to write about) but I do not know you. Even after all these years of writing this column, I still cannot work you out. Sometimes I write things that greatly amuse me — like how Jeff Bezos keeps his vitamin pills in his socks — which you judged stupid. But then I write something I think a bit lame, like how it is good to say no, and you like it a lot.
“It does not matter if readers can be an enigma. You read the stuff. You write to me intelligently about it. You have, one way and another, paid my salary, for which I am eternally grateful. I am not frightened of losing the status of FT club membership. It is the thought of being without the safety blanket of your response — both approval and disapproval — that is unnerving me.
“Yet even this does not scare me as much as the thought of teaching ratios to bottom set Year Nine. That truly terrifies me — which is precisely the point.”
Read more here.
