By Jeremy Miles
Fifty-five long years ago today I began work as a young newspaper reporter. Green, naive and pretty clueless but bolstered by the confidence of youth, I quickly became surprisingly well-regarded.
This was not because I was particularly good at the job but simply because a fellow junior hack taken on on the same day as me was so spectacularly useless that by comparison, my mediocrity looked quite impressive. Better still, by the time my hopeless colleague was sacked three months later, I had had time to learn.I met him a year or so later. He was working as a trainee private detective. I’m told that it didn’t last long. Apparently he was rubbish at being a gumshoe too.
For me those days marked the start of a long and fascinating career in journalism which as I hurtle towards my 75th birthday, still provides me with a few rewarding and interesting assignments. When I see how tough things can be for young people today I realise how lucky I was to start my working life at a time when things were so much simpler in the days when all you needed to get on was a little bit of ability, a few lucky breaks and the kind of self-assurance that comes from being so inexperienced that you have no awareness of what could go wrong.
In retrospect, I realise that I must havebeen a cocky little sod. I found this picture of me (the one with a with a beard) aged 20 and not yet a year into the job, grabbing the central position in the photograph and holding court at the firm’s Christmas dinner. Happy memories!