There was a tradition in the newspaper industry that on your last day before moving to a new job that you got presented with a leaving page.

I was reminded of this last week when a former colleague posted this group photo (see above) taken at one such occasion. You can just about see my head top right at the back.

The sub editors would design a spoof front page usually at the expense of the person who was leaving.

Needless to say, having worked in a few newsrooms over the past three decades, I have a few examples and thought it would be good to share some of them from my various reporting jobs.

As you can see this outlines various incidents, as well as a few embellishments, from my time in Scunthorpe. It would be fair to say that I had some “interesting” neighbours and, yes, I did have cat shit smeared on my front door.

Yes I have to admit that I did drink quite a few coffees back in the day but now I am more more of a convert to tea.

And the coffee addiction continues. Not surprisingly I did not get a leaving page when I left the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald in Penrith as my departure was rather hasty following the redundancy process.

I suppose as newspapers get rid of sub editors, and as reporters are required to write directly into templated pages because there are fewer sub editors, the tradition will sadly be consigned to the past.

And, while this is technically not a leaving page, it was done as a favour by one of the artists at the Scunthorpe Telegraph when they were redesigning the entertainments supplement.

I had conducted the interview a couple of weeks prior to this and the copy was used to provide content for the dummy pages. I did review the band’s latest album and was lucky enough to see their gig in Sheffield the following year.

I remember when I was speaking with Ian Gillan I did confess that listening to him singing on my Deep Purple records helped get me through my GCE/CSE revision which he found quite amusing.