Not NaNo15 November 13

So Lincoln was my first proper job as a journalist.  I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the city. I’d visited it a few times in my childhood because it was one of my Dad’s favourite places. We’d seen teh cathedral more than once and I could remember an area called The Glory Hole where swans gather under a bridge in the centre of town.  And no-one who’s ever walked up it will ever forget Steep Hill/. It didn’t gain its name lightly. It even has railings part ay up so that walkers can haul their way up the cobbled street.

But when I moved there it suddenly became a new place. There were lots of little corners that I had no recollection of. There were museums I didn’t know. And perhaps the best thing was that I had a flat at the top of town and I had a picturesque walk through the old town, past the cathedral, under teh medieval gate and down Steep Hill to waterside. Sometimes when I walked past the Minster the choir were singing and you could hear them for quite some distance.

Of all the ways to start your working life there are many worse. It was July and the weather was glorious that year. IT’s on record as being one of the warmest in recent decades. It’s easy to fall in love with a place when you have  great conditions.  Summer, new job, a working income for the first time ever, new places, new people and new challenges.

I quickly made friends with a couple of other young journalists who joined around the same time as me, and we became a firm clique for a number of years. Our jobs gave us a certain status. It was kind of impressive to tell people you worked on the local paper as a reporter.

One of my first stories was the kind that most of us dread. It was an obit about a young man who died after a very long illness. He’d been in a motor cycle accident a few years before and had been in bed in a semi conscious state ever since. Sometimes he could talk to his mum, but others he was more or less a vegetable. He died from complications of his injuries at a relatively early age in his mid 20s. And it was my job to talk to his mum and write his life story. To make matters worse he used to work for us as a printer and so we owed him a good write up.

I was dreading talking to his mother, but the day went far better than I expected. I thought she’s hate me for intruding into her grief, but she welcomed me, asked me in and made me a cup of tea. She took sympathy on me when I said it was my first week and she was almost my first story. She was the first death story I’d ever covered. She was so kind to me and wished me luck working for the company.  She even donated a kettle to me when I told her I’d just moved into my first flat and was having to make tea and coffee by boiling water in a pan.  I kept that kettle for years.  It was a proper old fashioned one that worked on the gas hob. And it had a whistle.

It was so homely and felt such a lovely, welcoming act to start my working life on. I’d been so worried about upsetting that woman, but she turned out to be one of the kindest, most forgiving people I met in my whole career. She deserved better than to lose her son that way.