A young man turned up at a newspaper many years ago, carrying a letter of recommendation from his headmaster.

That letter described him as “a boy with very lively intelligence, possessing powers of original thought along with a very retentive memory. He is perhaps too impetuous at present, but will outgrow that…”

The newspaper in question was in Ashton-under-Lyne and I can still remember, if only dimly, the office above a rank of shops.

That bright boy was not me but Sir Harold Evans, the feted editor of the Sunday Times, who has just died. But the newspaper was the same, something I didn’t know until reading last Sunday’s Observer.

My spell at the Droylsden Reporter began after two interviews in Ashton-under-Lyne. I didn’t arrive with a letter from my headmaster but, on a Saturday shift, sat at a typewriter to bash one out to an editor in London. This was for a job on the South East London Mercury, close to where I’d studied at Goldsmiths College.

The editor later said it was the best job letter he’d ever received. His advert was written in the style of the Chas and Dave song Gertcha, so I wrote my letter that way. A good trick, but only used the once.

Anyway, that all happened at the dusty end of the corridor, long ago.

My journalism career started after I advertised myself in the UK Press Gazette trade magazine. The advert ran along Catch-22 lines. How does someone without experience get some, basically. That opened doors I didn’t want opening, then some I did.

Here are my papers and places. The Ashton Reporter, the Mercury, the Yorkshire Evening Press (later truncated to the Press), the Press Association, Leeds Trinity University and York St John University, plus freelance feature writing for the Yorkshire Post (the cherry on a now almost gone cake).

To that list can be added the Observer for three years in the mid-1980s, but only on a Saturday, when a senior colleague wangled me an invite to the editor’s lunch, where wine and cheese were served. The man in charge at the time was Donald Trelford, always portrayed in Private Eye as “small but perfectly formed”.

Trelford wrote a touching appreciation of his rival in his old newspaper last week, headlined, “The Harold Evans I remember was a great craftsman, a crusader… and a rival without peer.”

It wasn’t easy being the editor of the Observer when the Sunday Times was captained by Harold Evans, as Trelford mentions. Despite the inky rivalry, or perhaps because of it, the pair became great friends. Sometimes they were mistaken for each other, both being short working-class northerners.

Evans had a long career of journalistic greatness, notably his exposure of the thalidomide scandal. Trelford remembers his opposite number’s journalistic credo, and it is a good one: “Keep digging, the truth is down there somewhere.”

At Leeds Trinity, where I taught journalism part-time for four years until the contract shrivelled and died, I introduced the topic of investigative journalism, and gave honourable mention to Evans.

Well, we Ashton-under-Lyne old boys have to stick together.

Actors are said to be ‘resting’ when they have no work. Perhaps something similar should apply to journalists. Not that I am resting, having just finished my first week in a new full-time job that runs until May. Nothing to do with journalism and that seems odd.

I’ve enjoyed the training so far but won’t be saying much about the role as it’s the sort of job where you have to be more guarded than I am used to.

So, there will be less time for this ledge, but I don’t intend to stop altogether. You can take the boy out of journalism but you can’t take the journalism out of the boy, or something like that.

So that’s the story of Sir Harold Evans and me, a whale and a minnow in an inky sea.