An old mate of mine once told me ‘I never buy a newspaper because I can read them for nowt when I have my fish and chips’. I said to him, ‘That’s alright, but the news might be seven weeks old by then!’ Undeterred he just winked and said, ‘Aye! and I’m seven weeks older by then as well.’ I then asked him if he ever bought the local newspaper. He said, ‘Oh! aye, I buy that, because that’s ours!’

Last Thursday I wrote my penultimate column for the Pontefract and Castleford Express. There was a paragraph in that piece which I hoped would let people know that I wouldn’t be writing for that paper anymore. To their credit the paper published my article, but they did edit it in such a way that people might have thought I myself had decided to leave the paper. I hadn’t decided…