My legs could well fall off two or three minutes from now, so I’d better type quickly before this laptop falls off my lap.

I’ve spent the day at Ipex, at the NEC in Birmingham, which it pretty much fills, making it the biggest printing show in the world. I’ve never been anywhere quite like it: even the Frankfurt Motor Show would have trouble competing.

These printers aren’t standard desktop inkjets; they’re enormous bungalows that you could live inside, printing 15000 pages an hour - four and a half every second - to the painful, incessant sound of gunfire. These are vicious monsters that have guards and railings and fenced off areas, that sweep huge great swathes of paper up over your head, slicing off corners and edges with a laser and blowing fine white ribbons of detritus through wide clear tubes like the ones in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

I must have walked miles through the hot, noisy halls, pausing only briefly for lunch in the pages over courtyard in the middle of the NEC, and was so worn out on the train back home that I slept almost all the way, which is something I almost never do.

I did get to meet up with Barney again, though, on his stand among the printing machines. We first met on a software trip to Monaco, and as we sat there sipping his employer’s beer were shocked to discover that that’s now eight years ago.

I have less hair, he has far more, but we’re both still doing largely the same thing. Where the intervening years have gone, though, I really don’t know.

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