Forty years in the business and Mary Ann Bloomfield’s not ready to jettison her notebook just yet.

This week she took time out to thank the readers who, over the years, have been the ones who have made her life in newspapers such a fun and lasting career.

She decided to write a letter from the editor, for her newspaper, the Mid Devon Gazette.

Letter to the Reader, Dear Sir or Madam,

Indulge me, just this once ...

Exactly 40 years ago today, I put my first step on the long and sometimes winding road that has taken me from apprentice reporter to the editor’s chair.

When I started out on my home town newspaper in semi-rural Warwickshire, newsroom technology was a battered black sit-up-and-beg Imperial typewriter (buy your own ribbons) and a crucial Friday job was cleaning out and refilling the sub-editors’ disgusting glue pots.

Speed was of the essence in getting prepared stories and photographs to the printing works – it was the office boy’s job to bear the important envelopes to the blue bus for a twice-daily run to the Walsall print works. The ticket cost eight old pence a time, I recall.

In mild weather, while the paper was being set up and printed, we would decamp to Sutton Park for a merry game of cricket and await the editor’s return with our wage packets.

Then it would be off to the pub to mull over the week’s tales – the potato that bore a remarkable resemblance to Winston Churchill, Falcon Lodge fruit and vegetable show, posturing debates between aldermen in the royal borough council chamber, heinous crimes dealt with by a lofty judge at the Assizes.

Now, the world is at my fingertips courtesy of the mighty megabytes and I can touch tropical Tuvalu quicker than I can trot over to Tiverton market.

I can set up and transmit a late-breaking story mere minutes before the plate is bolted on the super-fast press. And yes, there have been times when I have been able to say: “Hold the front page.”

Being a fly on the wall of other people’s existences for so long has been an endlessly fascinating privilege and so I feel I must mark this milestone by thanking you all – nice and occasionally not-so-nice, it has to be said – for letting me ply my trade in a wonderful, frustrating, challenging, and enjoyable world where there is no such thing as a normal day.

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