Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson Page A

recalls a large modern bar such as you might find in the first-class lounge of a well-appointed airport.
Even from beyond the security perimeter, I could see several new buildings inside, and I couldn't wait to find out exactly what facilities the staff had been blessed with. It was the first question I asked my old colleague - whose name I dare not confide here lest he find himself abruptly transferred to classified advertising telesales - when he came to collect me at the gate. 'Oh, I remember the swimming-pool,' he said. 'We never heard anything more about that once the dispute was over. But give them their due, they've increased our hours. They now let us work an extra day every fortnight without additional pay.'
'Their way of showing they think highly of you all?'t
'They wouldn't ask us to do more work if they didn't like the way we did it, would they?' Quite. .
We strolled along the main thoroughfare of the plant between the old brick storehouse and the monumental printworks.  People passed like extras in a Hollywood movie - a workman with a long plank of wood, two women in smart business suits, a guy with a hardhat and a clipboard, a deliveryman cradling a large pot plant. We passed through a door into The Times editorial suite and I gasped quietly. It is always a small shock to go back to a place where you worked years before and see the same faces toiling at the same desks - a combination of sudden familiarity, as if you've never been away at all, and profound, heartfelt gratitude because you have. I saw my old friend Mickey Clark, now a media star, and found Graham Searjeant in his little cave made of newspapers and press releases, some of them dating back to the days when Mr Morris was still making motorcars, and encountered many other friends and former colleagues. We did all the usual things -compared stomachs and bald patches and made lists of the missing and dead. It was quite splendid really. Afterwards, I was taken to lunch in the canteen. At the old Times building on Gray's Inn Road the canteen had been in a basement room that had the charm and ambience of a submarine and the food had been slopped out by humourless drones who always brought to mind moles in aprons, but this was bright and spacious, with a wide choice of tempting dishes served by chirpy cockney girls in bright, clean uniforms. The dining area itself was unchanged except for the view. Where formerly had sprawled a muddy swamp crisscrossed with neglected water channels full of bedsteads and shopping trolleys, there now stood row upon row of designer houses and jaunty blocks of flats of the kind you always find around redeveloped waterfronts in Britain, the sort of buildings where all the balconies and exterior trim are made from lengths of tubular metal painted red.
It occurred to me that though I had worked at this site for seven months, I had never seen Wapping and was, of a sudden, keen to have a look at it. When I had finished my pudding and bid fond farewells to my ex-colleagues, I hastened out through the security gates, intentionally failing to turn in my security pass in the hope that nuclear attack sirens would sound and men in chemical warfare suits would begin a sprinting search of the compound for me, and then, with nervous backward glances, I redoubled my pace up
|^'. jtennington Street as it occurred to me that at News International ?this was not actually outside the bounds of possibility.
I had never strolled through Wapping because during the dispute & was unsafe to. The pubs and cafes of the district teemed with disgruntled printers and visiting delegations of sympathizers - Scottish miners were particularly feared for some reason - who would happily have torn a wimpy journalist's limbs from his sockets to use as torches for that night's procession. One journalist who encountered some former printers in a pub some way from Wapping had a glass smashed in his face and, as I recall, nearly died, or at the very least failed to