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. |