I was almost certainly Scotland’s least-read football writer |
When I started writing this column a decade ago, the remit was to look at events from a West Highlands and Islands perspective, which has always been very unusual in mainstream Scottish journalism.
For me, that was no hardship since my own journalism and hence politics were founded on the old Land League motto, “An tir, an canan, ‘sna daoine/The land, the language and the people” to which, I hope, I have remained true. Over the years, the column morphed into wider comment mainly on Scottish affairs but, as I draw a line under this phase of my long association with The Herald, I can maybe be allowed a bit of reminiscing about how that relationship evolved over more than half a century.
When I left university, I had a clear objective with friends to set up the West Highland Free Press which we launched in 1972 on a financial shoestring. We paid ourselves £4 a week and while the paper was a great, radical success, ancillary income was soon a matter of some urgency.
Tony Findlay, who was assistant editor of The Herald spotted this and asked me to start contributing to the paper. Tony was a really good guy, influential in making The Herald a less staid publication than it had been traditionally and a great encourager of young journalists. His early death was a sad loss.
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Over the next few years, The Herald and I developed a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Even in these days, it was unlikely to fund a journalist to travel further than Paisley unless there was a football match to report. But if I kept travelling and phone (or telex) articles along the way, they would publish and pay. Along with my umbilical cord to the West Highland Free Press, it was perfect.
The first big trip I did on that basis was an unusual double-header. I hooked up........