Today I bought the News of the World. Last week I'd joined in with the obligatory Twitter hashtag-boycott-pass-the-parcel, but now I had a brilliant excuse for scabbing out: I'd been asked to read the final edition for this paper. Having fashioned a disguise from dirt and wool, I cycled to the newsagents at 7.30am, to find they were already selling fast. Clearly the boycott was having an effect. Having secured a copy, I made my excuses and left – after hiding it inside a necro-zoophiliac porn mag, so any passers-by outside wouldn't judge me too harshly.

I've bought the "Screws" countless times before. I used to buy it almost every week, bundled alongside a less "embarrassing" purchase (ie, a broadsheet). Over lunch I'd lay the papers out in front of me and invariably find myself reaching for the Screws first. I'd read about shagging chefs, chortle at a gaudy Franklin Mint ad for a souvenir Princess Di porcelain windmill collection, and feel vaguely superior for about 10 minutes. That's liberals for you.

Sometimes I'd be revolted by the way it casually vandalised human lives; exposing some hitherto unknown woman as a "vice girl", say, just to fill half a page. But a few weeks later my disgust would fade, and I'd pick up another copy. Bad for me – but I didn't stop buying it, just as I didn't stop buying cigarettes. It was the 90s, and I was young and dumb enough to view the world as a big cartoon. I smoked with the force and frequency of a man hell-bent on turning his lungs into a pair of charcoal slippers, in the belief that cancer couldn't catch me. In much the same spirit I'd read the News of the World "ironically", like an arsehole.

I can't remember when things changed (my NoW habit that is, not my arseholery – that's permanent), but at some point around the millennium I tired of laughing at the novelty plate ads and began to find the rest of the paper too grim to eat.

But never as grim as the past week, in which the paper (or more accurately, the paper's past) leaked diseased pus by the bucket: another litre of scandal every day. By Monday evening, former editor Rebekah Brooks' reputation was in tatters. By Wednesday those tatters had been tattered again. By the time Brooks was telling staff that they'd fully understand the closure "in a year's time" (presumably because it'll take 365 days to explain the full horror), her reputational tatterettes were shredded yet further: they currently exist in an unstable sub-atomic state visible only to her mind's eye.

The final edition is downright odd. If I were editor, I'd have scrawled nobs all over the front and plastered a cut-out-and-keep effigy of Brooks across the centre pages. Instead, the front page mumbles THANK YOU AND GOODBYE over a collage of previous headlines.

Inside is an account of the paper's history so rose-tinted you can smell the petals, focusing on its scoops and ignoring ghastly low points like the 1988 story about the actor David Scarboro (who played EastEnders' Mark Fowler before Todd Carty), in which it printed images of the psychiatric unit where he was receiving treatment. He later killed himself.

In 2009 a NoW editorial attacked this paper's phone-hacking coverage as "inaccurate, selective and purposely misleading". "NO INQUIRIES, NO CHARGES, NO EVIDENCE" it thundered. "Like the rest of the media, we have made mistakes . . . When we have done so, we have admitted to them."

Yet today, apart from a brief mention about the paper "losing its way" on page three, the closest the final edition gets to addressing the scale of the scandal comes in Carole Malone's column: a page that has previously functioned as a rectangular bin full of tutting, spite and rabble-rousing lies about illegal immigrants being given "free cars". This week she bemoans the paper's demise, but also says the relatives of murder victims have been "blighted by the actions of this newspaper", describes the hacking as "indefensible", and says she's "sorry for the sins of people who've hurt you and who shame us all".

The centre pages consist of a gallery of their "greatest hits": curiously underwhelming when it's all laid out. The Profumo scandal and Jeffrey Archer are in there, but so are three "gotcha!" snaps of celebs snorting coke – one of whom, Kerry Katona, was captured by a camera hidden in her own bathroom. Call me squeamish, but I'd say concealing a lens in a woman's bathroom is worse than hacking her phone. At least voicemails can't reveal which hand she wipes her arse with.

Also nestled amongst the roster of glorious front pages – JACKO'S DEATHBED: a photograph of the rumpled sheets on which Michael Jackson died. Yum! Proud of that, are they? Why, yes: hence its inclusion in their farewell souvenir. At least they didn't include a little collectible square of his skin.

The rest of the paper includes beach snaps of Gwyneth Paltrow, and some jovial bibble about footballers' haircuts, but also a strong investigative piece exposing a sex trafficker. Across other pages, bite-sized tributes from readers are scattered like croutons. "Britain will never be the same again," claims one. (Spoiler: yes it will).

There's also a gracious sign-off from Ian Hyland, and a self-indulgent final edition of Dan Wootton's XS showbiz column peppered with snaps of a grinning Wootton crushed against a series of celebrities as though trying to physically graft himself onto them, accompanied by messages from stars assuring him of his award-winning brilliance. A galaxy of anxious neediness compressed into one double-page spread.

Still, if the edition's overall tone is more sentimental than apologetic, it's hardly surprising, given that it was assembled by a team who – whatever you think of them – didn't hack a murdered schoolgirl's phone. Regardless, they lose their jobs; the woman who was editor at the time keeps hers. Thank you Rebekah. And goodbye to your staff.

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