Thinking back to column inches from dusty drawer marked history - Ian McMillan

Like a lot of dads and grandads (although not me, even though I’m a dad and a grandad!) my dad kept loads of old tools in a battered set of drawers in his garage.

Lots of them hadn’t been used since the time of the Suez Crisis and a number of them were more rust than metal but still he kept them just in case they came in handy for something or other.

Every now and then, in response to my mother’s metaphorical and literal nudging, he would clear the drawers out and once I watched him doing it and I was amazed to see that he’d lined the drawers with ancient copies of the Yorkshire Post from the late 1960’s and I then realised that of course the copies of the paper weren’t old when he put them in; they were that day’s news, fresh into print.

He took the spanners and hammers out and laid them on the concrete floor of the garage and I reached into the empty drawers and pulled out the old pages as though they were ancient tablets of wisdom, which in a sense they were.

Sadly, I can’t remember the headlines or any of the stories but I recall a picture of a building with a man in suit standing in front of it as though he was a Very Important Man In A Suit, and a photograph of a tree that, at the time, must have been a Very Important Tree.

Now this news was the olds, and it was about to be discarded in favour of some newer news that time could play with. At the time of the photograph the man in the suit thought that perhaps he’d be remembered forever.

He thought that in years to come people would think of him as the man who saved that building from demolition, or who demolished that building and constructed something new out of the rubble.

For a few weeks after the photograph had been in the paper, his mates at the pub would say ‘He’s here! The bloke in the Yorkshire Post!’ but after a while even that would stop happening and then the man in the picture would spend years buried under a pile of saws and nails.

And that’s why I began this week’s column in the way that I did because I’m imagining that this page has spent a long time lining a drawer somewhere. It could be in a spare bedroom in a big old house in Rotherham.

It could be in an office in an abandoned factory somewhere in the hinterland of the M62. It could be at the back of a shed in an allotment on the outskirts of Bridlington. Wherever this page is, it’s been there for years.

Now, I have to admit that I save all these columns in a box file; I’m not completely sure why as I’ve got them on my computer anyway, but I just like the printed page and I like to save the printed page.

That’s a kind of deliberate archiving, though; the using of the column to line drawers, particularly drawers in a neglected space, is a kind of accidental archiving.

Anyway, hello from 2023! I’ve just got one question: how long did it take Barnsley FC to get to the Premier League?