One Trump, three Tory PMs, 10 years and half a million words.. the final column. Thank you all, I’ll miss you. Now I know how Weller felt when he broke up The Jam
Well, friends, the day has finally come. The sun has set on our time in the sun. A little more than 10 years after this column first appeared, this will be the last Sunday morning you’ll read me here.
When the then-editor of the paper, Jim Wilson, asked me back in March 2012 if I fancied writing a weekly column for the Sunday Mail, I thought something like, ‘ This might be interesting for a few months.’ I had no idea it would end up lasting for over a decade…
When I was growing up, the only newspapers we had in the house were the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail.
Writers like Jimmy Reid and Joan Burnie were the first columnists I ever read. As a teenager, they helped me to expand my vocabulary and my thinking, and it’s something I always had in mind when writing this column: might this help a working-class kid growing up in a house where there are no books, where this is the only newspaper?
I appreciate this might be hugely deluded in the internet age, where teenagers look at newspapers the same way they might look at Penny Farthings, flares and video recorders, but there we are. As regular readers will know, I thought we’d vote ‘ Yes’ to independence, that Trump would have no chance of getting elected and that we’d never vote to leave the EU. I am hugely deluded.
Another thing I learned from reading people like Burnie and Reid back then was that being a long-running columnist involved having a dialogue with readers. Developing a shorthand. That they would come to know your prejudices, your likes and dislikes, as a friend in the pub would over the years. That, some weeks, they would open the paper thinking, ‘I hope he’s as angry as me about this thing this week.’
Some weeks, of course, you’d know exactly what you were going to write about on the Monday or Tuesday. Other weeks, you’d be pulling your hair out on the Friday morning, thinking, ‘Can I get 1000 words out of, umm, cutlery?’
One of the good things about writing a column for a Sunday publication was that you’d have a whole week of events to review. The downside, of course, was that many other writers would have got there before you and you’d have to consider,
“Will people really want to read another take on this by Sunday?” As Mark Renton put it in Trainspotting, “It’s a tightrope, Spud.”
And then there was the feedback from you out there, the readers, the dear and the gentle. Some of your letters floored me over the years. There was the woman from Saltcoats who wrote telling me she was housebound and looked forward to my column every week as it was like “having a pal round for a wee chat”. It broke my heart. I sent her flowers.
Of course, not all of you were so dear and gentle. There was the man from Argyll whose wife read my column, which led to her buying him my novel The Amateurs for his birthday. He did not enjoy it. “SICK, TWISTED RUBBISH!” his letter said. “I’VE SEEN BETTER WRITING ON THE WALLS OF PUBLIC LAVATORIES!” He went on to say he was “so disgusted I attacked the book with scissors and cut it up and threw it in a skip so that no one else would ever be able read it”. I did not have the heart to tell Mr
Argyll that, in a crazy bid to make a profit, the Random House corporation may have printed more than one copy.
So, I’m sure it won’t be tears all round at my departure. I’m sure there will many out there thinking something like, “Oh, thank God I don’t have to listen to that eejit banging on about Trump/Cameron/May/Johnson/ Brexit/whatever.” Farewell to you too, my friends. No hard feelings. As my old mum is fond of saying: “It’d be a boring world if we all liked the same things.” And, as regular readers will know, my beloved mum is possibly the fiercest, most loyal Daily Record and Sunday Mail reader on the planet, to the point where she simply refers to them as “the papers”. There are no others. She’ll probably take this departure harder than anyone. Mum – you can always phone me up on a Sunday morning and I’ll give you a personal rant about whatever’s bothering me that week.
Looking back at that last paragraph I see that, horrifically, my entire column has been written under
Conservative rule and I survived three of their prime ministers, in descending order of fitness. Come
September, it would have been four: either
Sunak or Truss. What a choice, eh? It’s like the tagline for Alien vs Predator.
“Whoever wins, humanity loses.”
Unlike those three prime ministers,
I worked under three very fine leaders over the years. To my editors: Jim, thanks for hiring me way back when. Brendan and Lorna, thanks for keeping me on.
And thanks to all three of you for letting me do pretty much whatever I wanted every week, surely sometimes against your better judgment. Thank you too to all the sub-editors and picture editors who’ve toiled over my copy. If I’m invited to make a final appearance at the Christmas party this December, then the drinks are on me. (Wines and beers only, no spirits. Terms and conditions may apply.)
To go back to that analogy of having a conversation with a friend in the pub, the danger is that if the conversation goes on long enough, you start repeating yourself.
So, it’s time to be off. Like Paul Weller breaking up The Jam in 1982 at the peak of their popularity (an event clearly of equal magnitude to me leaving the Sunday Mail), I’m hopefully doing it before things get too stale and I’m leaving with just the right balance of emotions: an equal mixture of regret and relief.
But God, I’ll miss it. There have been weeks when it’s felt like an immense privilege to have a public platform to talk about something personal to me, rather than the “important” news of the day. In fact, from your letters and comments on social media, some of these things have been the pieces that connected most with readers: when I’ve talked about my mum, or my brother’s suicide, or the letter to my late dad on Father’s Day back in 2013, or the tribute to my old friend Keith Martin, who died far too young in 2018. Or about the birth of my children. The patchwork of triumphs and tragedies that make up all of our lives.
And it’ll take me a while to figure out quite what to do with myself on a Friday morning. For 10 years, wherever I’ve been in the world, I’ve sat down with laptop and coffee and thought something like, “Right, who’s getting it this week?”
I’ve written these pieces in houses and hotels in Los Angeles, New York, Melbourne, Bangkok, Sydney, Miami, Antigua, Oslo, Morocco, Turin, Sardinia, Seville, Berlin, Bavaria and on trains and planes at all points between. The column is a demanding mistress and, bar the odd holiday here and there, it’s been 1000 words every week for a decade – roughly half a million of them. Five of my novels. Or one of Jonathan Franzen’s.
And, yes, deluded fool that I am, I’m hoping some kid out there goes off and reads one of Franzen’s novels because of that reference. Well, maybe they’ll google him.
So, take care. I’ll miss you. Thank you for having me in tthe house every week we for so long.
Quick Q readthrough, thr final spellcheck, spe attach to ememail, hit “send” for tthe last time and I’ll see you all in a b bit.
Down Do the road apiece. apiec
Some of your letters floored me.. God, I’ll miss it