President Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty at the United Nations.
The Taliban captured Kabul in Afghanistan after driving out President Rabbani and executing the former president Najibulla.
The US launched Operation Desert Strike against Iraq.
And I wrote my first column.
I’d been reading that particular column slot for the previous 20 years. For much of the time it had been penned by the legendary Roland Clark as Norwester. Roland was thought-provoking and clever. I had the pleasure of meeting him a couple of times and he was a lovely fellow. He died in 2004.
When he put his pen down it was taken up by Geoff Prickett from Morere, between Wairoa and Gisborne.
A column Geoff wrote was that this was to be his final piece and I was disappointed as I enjoyed his writing. Then on a whim I rang my old Lincoln classmate Tony Leggett who had reached the lofty heights of editor of The New Zealand Farmer, a publication that had been published for over 100 years and said I reckoned I could fill the breach.
He wanted some proof but as I hadn’t written anything since sixth form English, took me on with a weekly contract so he could knock me on the head at any stage if I was as bad as he expected and as far as I know I’m still on my weekly contract.
The NZ Farmer closed in 2001 leaving The Tablet as the longest running periodical in the country and I was picked up by the sister paper called Straight Furrow, which I was with until 2006 when Tony Leggett and Dean Williamson finally enticed me over to this fine paper, The NZ Farmers Weekly.
Over these 20 years I’ve worked for 10 or 11 editors including Tony, Hugh Stringleman, Susan Topless, Tim Fulton, Rebecca Harper and Bryan Gibson, my current editor and of course right up there with the best of them.
Then there have been a line-up of long suffering sub editors. They are the folk who correct the spelling and grammar and choose the headlines for the column. Currently Stephen Bell has that task. His predecessor Terry Tacon and I would have email battle exchanges over anything that would induce a decent argument.
Terry gets the prize for the best headline ever when having written in a year-end piece that I’d bought a metal cormorant made from beaten Zimbabwean oil drums for Jane’s Christmas present, he titled it as “I’m going to give my wife a shag for Christmas”.
The Straight Furrow was a fortnightly so I haven’t written the 1000 columns that one would have with 50 each year over the two decades but probably about 800 and at maybe an average of 700 words have typed some 560,000 words.
War and Peace has 587,000, The Lord of the Rings a mere 470,000 but Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) has 1,200,000.
Those early columns were typed on a Windows 95 computer, a veritable beast compared to its DOS (Disk Operating System) predecessors with a massive 1 gigabyte of hard drive memory. Two or three computers later this current one has 1000 gigabytes.
For a few months I’d print out the columns and fax them to my editor and some poor sod would then have to type them up. I could email them once I worked out just what the internet was.
Other than my editor, my mate Chris was the only person I knew who was on the internet back then so we could email only each other. Our email host was Pegasus Mail and our internet provider was Voyager down in Wellington.
I get a lot of direct feedback from readers, much of it kind and some of it not so but sometimes deserved. I don’t tend to engender angry letters to the editor as my style is a little more folksy than most columnists but we get the odd one, which is all good.
I don’t particularly enjoy the writing process as it can be like pulling teeth so will quite often finish near midnight right on deadline having prevaricated all evening.
But I like it when I’ve finished and don’t have another deadline for a week.
The one thing in my life that I’m particularly proud of is that I’ve never taken leave or missed a deadline. Admittedly, it’s nearly always right up until the last moment and when away from my desk, until I had an iPad, sometimes written on borrowed computers and various internet cafes.
It has been a real pleasure and privilege to have done this for as long as I have.
Maybe I need to consider retiring from the job soon and give someone else an opportunity.
Maybe Leggett will exercise his power of the weekly contract and terminate.
Whichever, thanks for being a patient reader.
