The old Daily Mirror building in Manchester

No journalists in my family but the ink got in somehow.

In the sixth form in the early 1970s, I worked on the Daily/Sunday Mirror in Manchester as a copy boy, carrying proofs and putting messages in vacuum bottles. Rode there from the suburbs on a Honda 50.

After that I went to Goldsmiths College in London to study English. The first person I ever interviewed, for the student paper, was the actor Leonard Rossiter, a prickly sort. Student years rolled away and I found a job as a reporter on the Droylsden Reporter in Manchester, leaving after six months to head back to London to work on the South East London Mercury.

Stayed there for ten years. The office was next to Deptford station, with a view of the platform. A world of typewriters and carbon copies, ashtrays on the desks, and lunchtime tipples in days when people still tippled at lunchtime. When you made a call, the switchboard woman connected you to the outside world.

Worked as a news reporter, feature writer, arty type, and sub-editor, interviewing Squeeze, Dire Straits, the Flying Pickets, assorted alternative comedians, and too many actors to shake a chewed biro at, although Doctor Who’s Tom Baker was in there somewhere, mad as anything but fun.

During that time, I also did sub-editing shifts on the Observer, working with a white-bearded man the printers called Captain Birdseye (me they called Captain Birdseye’s Son). His name was Michael Jacobson, and he is long gone.

Then on to the Yorkshire Evening Press. Stayed there for a preposterous 27 years. Happy times mostly, eventually running the features desk, editing, laying out pages and supplements, writing columns, reviews, features, subbing endless words, editing.

All good until it fell apart in a sorry heap of Newsquest templates and redundancy. But the people were great, as newspaper people often are (not everyone will believe this, but generally it’s true).

After that, a year was spent barely scratching a living from freelance features, although I did start writing for the Yorkshire Post, mostly in the Saturday magazine.

Then came my first stint working for the Press Association, learning Irish ways on the Sunday Independent newspaper, working ‘in’ Dublin out of Howden. Two days a week for four years until the contract ended.

In tandem with that job came a part-time journalism lecturing stint at Leeds Trinity University (loved that gig, but it went) and some equally enjoyable lecturing at York St John University, too.

After that my only non-journalistic work ever followed, as a Census engagement manager. You were meant to get out and about and meet people, but it was lockdown, and I never left the study.

Then came my second stint at the Press Association, working from home as a digital production editor, helping to process the endless stream of news, as part of a busy crew.

A lifetime in journalism, all the way from those clattering typewriters, carbon copies and a cigar-chewing editor, to a digital newswire that never sleeps. That editor, by the way, was Roger Norman, acclaimed for taking a stance against the National Front, and known to like a Guinness or two. Another one who is no longer with us, sadly.

Today was my last shift for the Press Association, but that’s not quite the end of everything. I still hope to be writing features for the Yorkshire Post, having one planned already for January. I will vainly attempt to get more crime novels published (two came out a while back in the US), as somehow I never get around to stopping writing.

I will also have a go at being retired, a grandad and co-babysitter, while still dribbling on about stuff in this blog.

It’s hard to say what sort of a future that young man had planned all those years ago when starting out. Probably a grander one than the one eventually arrived at, but that’s not a problem. I always wanted to be a journalist, I stuck at it through a varied career, while clinging on to the skidding wreckage of journalism.

Time for my retirement do, otherwise known as a drink with my wife at the Crooked Tap.