You know the years are accumulating when you are in at both the birth and death of an era-defining piece of technology. So it is with Obiter and the fax machine. 

We recall the excitement when a fax was installed in the lobby of Obiter’s first employer, another venerable society with a royal charter. No need to wait for press releases to arrive in the post or in the oil-stained gauntlets of a despatch rider. Just walk down five flights of stairs and pick them up from reception, hot (literally) off the presses!

We were up and down those stairs all day – which is OK when you are in your 20s. 

Now it has fallen to the Civil Procedure Rule Committee to deliver the coup de grâce. The ‘outdated’ fax is being gently edited out of requirements for service. 

This is surely the end. Since about 2005, the only people who have ever faxed the Gazette have been libel lawyers scenting a payday and hoping to catch the editor on the hop. (Our machine was chucked in the Chancery Lane skip years ago.)

All of which brings to mind a practical joke once played by editors on keen but impressionable young reporters when news was still printed on dead trees. ‘Hey, the printers have run out of paper,’ the old lag would claim. ‘Could you do me a favour and fax them through some blank sheets?’

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