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I'm honoured and very pleased to announce this week that we
have a new scribe, Sinclair Newton, who has now joined the team to contribute
his humorous column - Sober Life, which will surely offer an alternative
well-balanced line-up to our weekly Electronic whiz-bang. Sinclair
is a genuine touché-á tout Jack of all trades in search of
harmony and replying on logic rather than instinct. He will express himself in
wonderful lucid, jargon-free English, not just because he writes with the authority
of a genuine scholar, but also because he has cleverly adopted an already fascinating
subject to make it appeal to the interest and assumptions of contemporary readers. I
first met this no-nonsense professional and amusing character in a Manchester
City centre pub during the middle 1970s when he then sported a bubble-cut hairstyle
and wore a large gold ring in the lobe of his left ear. In
those days Sinclair was the assistant News Desk Editor for the North of England
office of the Daily Mail national newspaper. He was similar to an orchestra
leader but instead of him being in the band pit he use to sit around a large desk
in a huge room with several other news editor journalists to gather in the news
stories of the day. His job then was for him to make the all important and vital
decisions of which reporter to send out who he thought would be best mentally
equipped with the proper cutting-edge to cover the particular story in question. I
was also working then for the Daily Mail news desk and my job was to chaperon
the superstar playboy crime reporter of the day, Ian Smith. Amongst many other
pinnacle stories, we covered the notorious "Yorkshire Ripper" until
Peter Sutcliffe was eventually caught in the act at the beginning of January 1981
in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Those were marvellous heady
days for all concerned when our minds would be rock solid together from the perils
of the go-it-alone and with hand-crafted guidance our energy levels would rise,
filling us with enthusiasm and self-confidence to achieve the all-clear know-how
of a more in-depth man-to-man bonding. It stands to rhyme
and reason that there are many interesting stories still to be told from those
would-be exciting times. However, unless something has not been written down it
doesn't exist and without any hard-done-by feelings this is a wait-and-see basic
recipe for disaster. Nevertheless, to cut a long story
short, I left England at the time of Peter Sutcliffe's arrest and drove here to
live and spend more halcyon days on this unique island of Ibiza. Sinclair stayed
in his job until they closed the main northern office of the Daily Mail
in Manchester and he then took a lucrative redundancy pay-off to embarked on new
career in the middle 1980s. At the beginning of the 1990s
and two wives later, Sinclair decided to come and give it a go at living and hopefully
working here in Ibiza. Unfortunately, the dreaded booze got the better of our
Sinclair and he had to depart from the island in a hurry the same year due to
ill health of both body and mind and return to recover in the UK. Concluding:
with time as a healer after a tremendous struggle and battle, Sinclair's will
power has won the day and the good man now no longer drinks any form of alcohol
whatsoever. Therefore, I believe that we're all going to enjoy the weekly column
from Sinclair - Sober Life.
Sinclair Newton's
first break into journalism came when he was offered a job as office junior at
the Evesham Journal. Read Sinclair's Obituary 'Death of
a former news editor'
www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/news/2003/03mar/030313sin.shtml
Gary Hardy
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