Empty chairs

Seven fellow ex-employees of the publishers I left 14 years ago met up for lunch in Wallingford, the nearest town to our ex-business park in the fields (my walk from the bus stop to the office used to be through a registered field of medicinal opium poppies). I hadn't seen most of them for five years, and two I had never met, so I wasn't sure how it would be, but the laughs haven't changed.

I was employed there for three years as a graphic designer, having just finished a part-time HNC, and I got the job not for my minimal graphic design skills but because no-one else wanted to typeset the publications that were in French. The pay was low but I was grateful to be paid to learn, I enjoyed using French, my colleagues in design and editorial were all fun and happy to teach me, and my line manager offered Secondborn summer holiday work for three years which was a great stepping stone for her, so it was a good place for me.

I especially remember a long phone call trying to explain to the Paris-based French 'editor', who had got the job because he could speak fluent French and quite good English, why publications have to have an even number of pages. When I realised it was going to be a long and complicated conversation I spoke up so that everyone in our open-plan office could hear. Cruel, but Alain didn't know that twenty designers and editors were doubled up in repressed hysterics. He eventually understood that paper has two sides but when I moved onto why our publications actually had to have a number of pages divisible by 8 it was all too complicated by half. Or by 1¾. Or π. Or something. When he next visited the UK everyone was kind and I presented him with a piece of A4 folded in half twice and the centime dropped.

The last of our cohort was made redundant three months ago. They all agreed I was right to take voluntary redundancy when I did - the tales of the downward slide since then were eye-watering, some unrepeatable.