Like the Duke of Clarence in Richard the Third (or Tupac Shakur in ‘Death Around the Corner’), I predicted my own demise. I’d been writing a column in Good Weekend, a supplement of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, for about 10 years, when it occurred to me every industry I had entered had collapsed. I began my working life as a typesetter, a trade that was devoured in a mouthful by the ravenous, patricidal beast of desktop publishing. I became a subeditor, and watched as tables of once-respected subs were devalued, demoralised and finally dismissed, their skills drowned in a sour cocktail of spellcheck programmes, Wikipedia and management apathy that broadened into open hostility. I edited men’s magazines, and that market sector collapsed. I began to write books, and the publishing industry quickly tumbled into an unprecedented decline. In my second Good Weekend column of 2012, I mused that there’d been a lot of ‘lifestyle’ columnists around a decade before, waxing whimsically and repetitively to a diminishing audience, yet I was one of the last men standing. One issue later, the new Good Weekend editor, Ben Naparstek, axed the column.

I wasn’t sorry to see it go, but I was surprised. After all, it had survived the savagery of the focus groups that killed off my erstwhile colleagues, Maggie Alderson and Stephanie Dowrick, whose columns the readers had supposedly ceased to read. And the column’s return after the New Year’s break was flagged with the cover-line ‘Mark’s Back’, which implied a certain permanency to the arrangement. But I figured Naparstek might have made the right decision. A column should live for two years, not ten, and I’d become increasingly weary of living with such a high public profile.