The world from my window

Forty years ago (I can't believe it's forty years ago), I entered with great trepidation the Portakabin of Life as part of the Mirror Group Newspapers training scheme in Plymouth. I was eighteen and rather nervous. I didn't really feel like I belonged there, alongside clever graduates from Oxford and similarly lofty establishments. I was a comprehensive school girl from Somerset. But English was the only subject I was ever any good at. And since the age of about nine or ten, I'd wanted to be a journalist. I put that down to having watched the wisecracking Rosalind Russell in the 1940s film His Girl Friday . I wanted to be like her - smart, sassy, witty, independent. I also wanted to wear those suits. And maybe catch the heart of Cary Grant. The school's careers adviser said journalism was a competitive business and I'd be better off in retail management or train to be a librarian. I can't sell anything for toffee and I'm not particula...

Thirty years ago, when I was twenty, I went with my mum and my young daughter to take a look at Bridport, where I was about to start a new job as a reporter on the local paper. It was only twenty miles from the place I was born, but I didn't know it at all. We walked up to the top of the windswept East Cliff and looked around us, my blonde little girl covering her eyes because she didn't want her photo taken. It was wonderful, and I fell in love with the place immediately. It's a love affair that has continued  ever since. I was privileged through my job to get to know the  place and its people very well. I even wrote a book about it, which became a bestseller, if only in the local area. Even now, living in the hinterland, I get anxiety attacks if I don't have a Bridport fix every now and then. It's My Kind of Town . So I was thrilled to see this film posted on YouTube by a young Twitter friend, who obviously feels the same. Stand up and take a bow, Stephen ...