When you pick up our newspaper which comes through your door do you wonder about the process that goes into creating the printed work of art?

If your answer is no, never fear, as you're not alone. That's why a troupe of us from the office were sent over to one of Newsquest's printing presses on Thursday.

As the time ticked ever closer to our impending deadline, us Haringey reporters jetted off to Colchester to see the grinding machinery at work on our precious stories.

Sitting here in the office, slogging away on our daily stories, we give little thought to the intricate final process of creating our paper. We press send our a computer our end and it whizzes across electronically to another computer in Essex. There they compile the pages, laser them onto metal sheets, ink these images onto material which in turn then imprint themselves onto sheets of newspaper, to be slotted together and bundled up into lorries.

And that in fact is a very simplified version of the process. Most of the explanations of what goes on in these surprisingly small factories was beyond my comprehension. All of the technical detail just went straight over my head. The guys who live and work on the process talk about it as if it were second nature to them - and to be honest it is. Many of them have more knowledge about their subject than is contained in the up to date computer systems. Inevitably all of this knowledge cannot be translated to even the most inquisitive of reporters in the short space of an hour.

But a few things did strike me. Did you know that newspapers do not come hot off the press? I suppose I had taken the statement “hot off the presses” literally without thinking it through at all. Actually the final stage is a rather cold and damp one. The ink has barely touched the pages before they are churned out pf the machine at a rate of knots and bound together. The result is a paper which is still slightly damp with ink - and not at all warm.

Disappointing, you may think, but not when you realise these machines are working at a rate of 50,000 copies an hour. Some times it can take me just as long to dry my hands under one of those machines in toilets. And all the while these copies are intricately inspected by men beavering away in a noisy room. That’s not me being sexist - they really were all men. And men highly trained in their field.

Us journalist may think we’re the bees knees sitting here tapping away, at the forefront of local news, but what goes on behind the scenes is a lot more complicated than we first imagined. The men working on the paper didn’t know who we were and probably didn’t care that they were seeing thousands of copies of our work an hour. What mattered was the quality of the paper they were printing, and that dedication to a seemingly never-ending process was actually quite humbling.