Fair, with a bit of play

“It’s a shipping magazine. We should
put ships on the cover.” Nah

I wrote this piece to mark the closure of Fairplay magazine in November 2018 after 135 years of publication. I joined Fairplay in 1995 and soon became its first ever sub-editor, which meant I controlled everything that got published – a privilege I abused massively.

When I was asked to write something for its final issue, I foolishly didn't check the word count I had been given, so I had to abandon the piece reproduced here and ended up writing something entirely different. Still, unlike what appeared in the final issue, this conveys some of the fun we had producing the magazine in the 1990s and 2000s. I could be wrong, but the loss of that sense of fun might have contributed to its demise.