I love this photo for two reasons. Firstly, it’s just wonderfully random. But secondly it reminds me of my years as a reporter on a very small local paper.

You may sneer but local news is great fun and great training for journalists. I don’t think I’d be able to survive doing what I do today without the fantastic training I got at the Evening Leader in North Wales, where I spent my last year as chief reporter. Day after day we had to fill a newspaper against the odds and find a splash – or front page – when literally nothing newsworthy was happening.

This particular picture was taken during a mini bomb scare in a village, where someone thought they had dug up a hand grenade and got the bomb disposal squad out. It turned out to be something completely harmless like a stone, or a piece of debris. It probably still made page one.

A number of stories and experiences from my time there stand out for me, and sadly most of them involve death. One was the time an elderly man committed suicide using a chain saw. Another was when someone’s ashes were stolen from their grave.

Another – admittedly not my story – was when a bereaved father killed himself on his adult daughter’s grave. And another was when some suspected drug dealers set fire to a young man they had doused in petrol before putting him out again and dropping him home.

A police inspector I became quite friendly with, and who had previously worked in Merseyside, once told me that the level of violence in small-town North Wales was always about 10 times greater than in the nearby cities.

Despite all this, it’s a few other moments that stick with me most. In terms of strangeness without a doubt the winner is the morning I had to interview someone with their dead son’s corpse in an open coffin also in the room. It remains the one and only time I have seen a dead body. I am well aware how lucky that makes me.

But in terms of stories there are only a couple. One was the time I managed to get the issue of refugees into the paper, by telling the story of a young Kurdish man who was working locally but who had arrived in the UK in the back of a container lorry after losing half his family to Saddam Hussein’s regime. For me that was a definite awakening and a taster of things to come.

The other was my first really big ‘scoop’ – and remember we are talking local rags here. I uncovered the story of a 65-year-old ‘sex pest’ primary school head teacher who was being taken to a tribunal by three of his female employees. I later covered the hearing itself and as a local hack it really was gold dust…just very, very salacious – to the point of ridiculous.

quoting:
…she said: “He once rubbed my bottom and called it a ‘prime piece of rump steak’, and once when he tried to kiss me he attempted to part my lips with his tongue.”

“the headmaster made regular sexual advances towards her, and nicknamed her ‘pillows’ in reference to the size of her breasts”

“It felt sleazy and wrong. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sound of his heavy breathing as he bent close to me,” she said.

I really do miss working for local papers sometimes. I hope they survive their current crisis because it would be a tragedy, were they to disappear.