The news surrounds us, accompanies us, unites us as never before. We wake to the news-magazines of our radio and television, we fall asleep to round-up and special report. Our car journeys are marked out in bulletins. Our train trips swamped in endless pages of print – free, daily, weekly, monthly. Throughout the day, Comment and Analysis shoulder along beside us like twin shaven-headed bodyguards, forcing a path through the jostling hours, hanging around outside the door whenever something else requires our attention.

Then there’s all the specialist news – sport, economics, politics, arts and science. Not to mention the media pages: the news about the news. And (deep breath) the news about not the news at all: the celebrity news. Underneath and over all this there’s 24-hour news – all of the above and more, continually, from a choice of broadcasters, on a choice of media. Plus news in brief. Not forgetting the news reviews – jokes about the news, satires, send-ups, knock-downs.

And when all this news is done there is… all of it again. This time from a different outlet. The Internet. To which we turn when we need to know the absolute latest or – a curious modern paradox this – when we have missed something from weeks ago and need to check back.

In short, the news and our experience of the news has changed more in the last 25 years than in the entire six and a half centuries since Gutenberg came grinning and jigging from his workshop with news of his printing press. Like Keanu Reeves when at last he beholds The Matrix, we have come to understand that the news is ubiquitous. The common fabric of our world.