I found myself in the area around St Paul's Cathedral in London last week, and took a few moments out to pay homage, not to its architect Sir Christopher Wren, but to Brendan Bracken, the architect of modern financial journalism.
Just over the road from Wren's great monument stands Bracken House, named after the man who was responsible for the modern version of the Financial Times.
I'm grateful to Bracken not just for the paper, in my view the best in the world, but also for giving me my break in journalism. Between 1979 and 1986 I learnt the rudiments of the profession at Bracken House, and there couldn't have been a better training course.
In those days, newspaper production was not just the intellectual process of getting smart people to write clever things; it was also a major industrial undertaking.
Bracken House is five storeys high, and back in the age of "hot metal" news production, was also five storeys deep.
In the bowels of the building, the foundry, typesetters, printing presses and stacking belts roared away, churning out hundreds of thousands of copies that were then distributed by trucks across the UK.
But it was also what the corporate theorists call a "flat" management structure. In the staff canteen the cerebral and patrician editor would rub shoulders with the "stone man" - a printer in inky overalls whose job it was to get completed pages ready for the print run.
A humble sub-editor like myself might find himself sharing a table with the editor of the Lex column. It was great for esprit de corps.
The paper moved out of Bracken House in the late 1980s, when the economics of the industry were revolutionised by Rupert Murdoch. Proprietors realised that newspapers did not have to be printed in the same building where they were written, and the great newspaper diaspora began.
Now newspaper offices are scattered across London, and banks, lawyers and accounting firms occupy Fleet Street.
Bracken House, a listed building and therefore protected from demolition or redevelopment, is owned by a Japanese financial institution, Mizuho International.
The FT is published, although not printed, south of the Thames in Southwark.
After my little trip down journalism's memory lane, I met up with an FT staffer, a colleague and friend going back years. He's well plugged in to what is going on at the newspaper, and we had a chat about the burning issue of the day: will it be sold by its owner, Pearson?
The rumour mill has been in full swing for months, ever since the departure of the former chief executive Marjorie Scardino, that the paper was for sale. Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Mr Murdoch, even Arabian Gulf investors have all been touted as buyers.
My pal thought serious consideration had been given to the possibility of a sale by John Fallon, the new chief executive, and expressions of interest received from potential buyers, or banks working for them.
But, he now believes, Mr Fallon has decided to hold off on a sale for two or three years. "That will give them plenty of time to make the paper and the website more profitable, mainly through cutting costs even further," he said.
There's everything to be said for making a business lean and efficient, especially in the highly competitive world of financial information. But I hope it doesn't go too far, and eat into the FT's unique content.
Brendan Bracken wouldn't have liked that at all.
fkane@thenational.ae