Don't Look Back

"Pa," young Jasper said to me this morning, "perhaps your readers would enjoy reading about how you got interested in journalism?" I thought I detected just a hint of sarcasm in his voice, but it's so difficult to tell with the younger generation these days. Well, it's an idea, anyway.

When I try to recall the spark that led me into a life-time of working in a newsroom, I'm drawn inevitably to that Christmas Day in 1953, when an excited young chap opened up his presents to find, amongst them, a John Bull Printing Set.

In the days before blogs and computers, this was possibly the only way a youngster could get to see his name in print. For the benefit of anyone who never saw the John Bull in all it's glory, it provided an array of tiny rubber letters (none of which, strangely, came with accents - unless there was a special edition of French letters that I never discovered), and you were expected to slide these into a special holder.

Once you had assembled your words, using a tiny pair of tweezers, you were ready to impress them on an ink pad, and then away you went. Of course, producing anything more than a few lines was the labour of Hercules - but it was a start. This was desk top publishing at its most primitive. But the heady smell of the ink, the wondrous smudgy feel of the paper when it had received its imprint was like a drug to a child with little opportunity before him other than, perhaps, working down a local mine.

I am sure it was that Christmas Day, in the kitchen of that tiny, terraced house, that my fire was first lit. The rest, as they say, is history.