Chapter one: Is this retirement or just the start of a whole new Barbara book?
SO THIS is it. The Big R. Retirement Day. I’m fit, healthy and at the top of my game.
But I have to go. For goodness sake, there’ve been seven redundancies this July on this heart-of-the-community Teesside evening. Several more last Christmas. Fewer and fewer remain to do more and more work.
So isn’t it fair I pop off? After all Society speaks as though we who have served our purpose, paid our taxes and given birth to the next generation, should just wander off quietly. Tuck ourselves up and cause no bother. Or best of all die. That way the NHS and the pension system isn’t overloaded.
Grim. Yes. But from this aged standpoint, not too far off the mark.
Age may creep up on you, but retirement is the brick wall you bang into.
That doesn’t mean I’m feeling miserable about the whole affair. After all, I had no intention of begging my employers to gizajob so I could go on being an award winning feature writer staffer.
(In what whacky world does a government make such a demeaning crackpot law that you have to ASK to keep your job just because you are 65? Discrimination. Bah!)
Photo: Me celebrating with the Boro at the Carling Cup Final
So today is my last. Tomorrow I’m 65. I may rail against it, but there it is. I’m officially old. And as BBC breakfast writers so eloquently put it yesterday, I am expected to “see out my days” in some retirement pod.
Well, no I’m not. I’m filled with joy at the thought of skipping (without the aid of a zimmer frame) into a life I’ve never had time to lead.
I’m awash with optimism, like I’ve downed a dose of Teesside favourite recreational drug.
After all, my REAL name is Barbara Argument so I was born to be a journalist! What’ s more I can’t exist without KNOWING what’s going on out there in my patch.
So this Barbara Argument will be my own personal newspaper for now on and I hope you will log on to read all about it.
What are my memories of a life far less ordinary? Well it started a breathtaking 47 years ago on the Gateshead Post on Tyneside when as a determined 18 year-old, I persuaded the editor to employ me.
He said I could do it for nothing for a month (nothing changes!) and then I was taken on at £4.50 a week. That meant being one of two completely naive cub reporters who swept the wooden floor boards, sprinkling water first so the dust didn’t rise. We cleaned the loos, unloaded heavy paper wadges for the flat-bed press roaring beneath us and changed our Geordie to posh to pretend The Post had an advertising department.
On Thursdays I looked after the editor’s dog while he went to Rotary lunch.
It was a fabulously mind-blowing introduction to the world of criminals, civic goings-on and the heartbreak outpourings of families struggling to keep heads above water in the face of death and disaster, joy and triumph.
Then there was the Shields Gazette and a riotous time with we disgraceful twenty year-old taking in the local strip club before dancing in the midnight waves of the North Sea. Oh, we did work too. Of which more later.
Onwards to the biggy. The Evening Chronicle in Newcastle, my home town, where I had the time of my life. More later.
Then marriage and a news editor stint at the Evening News, Carlisle, before a 10 year break to bring up my three bairns while Best Pal set off for ITN and the glory days of News at Ten and 5.45. More later.
Back in the work world as a feature writer, it was the good old Coventry Telegraph and editor Geoff Elliott who took a punt on me to offer a break back into the business — and the chance to win three feature awards on the trot. More later.
Onwards back in the North-east, I have been a feature writer for nine years at the Evening Gazette, Middlesbrough, where I won the region’s feature writer of the year award and ended up as Chief Writer. Again, more later.
Today I say goodbye to an ever-smaller band of colleagues who will battle to keep my Gazette going. I hope they have the stamina to keep going in the face of redundancies, industry break-up, management which cares little for people — and the sheer misery of being overworked, unappreciated and underpaid.
I have never been so glad my kids didn’t choose to live by traditional regional journalism because I fear like many in the know for its future.
Bosses from the grassroots viewpoint, have no idea of how to stop the rot.
They are doing a great job of looking like sharks thrashing round in ever-tightening net.
Great journalists with their hearts in the community are being shrugged off and those who are left are totally disillusioned by the whole disintegration process.
I have absolutely loved my ridiculously wonderful career which started cleaning bogs on a weekly – and ends, in the traditional sense, today with the must-have journo’s booze-up.
Tomorrow is another day and I intend to prove you CAN teach an old dog new tricks, new media tricks. And an old dog can teach new media something too.
Tomorrow we will speak about more things of joy …
