I worked for 12 newspaper editors. Fewer than half of them were much good. One of them went into a funk and shrivelled into nothingness, one had serious concentration problems, one wasn’t a lot of use after lunch, one had IDD (ideas deficit disorder) and so on. Four of the others, Harold Evans, Andreas Whittam Smith, Paul Dacre and Andrew Neil, were high among the outstanding editors of their era. Two of them inspired affection, love even, from their staff and associates, the other two – not so much.

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Superstar interviews had their place in Honey of course but few of them were memorable. Happily they weren’t crucial. A contributor, clearly a man of great sensitivity, went to interview a famous blonde actress who had reportedly had close encounters with a royal. He was so depressed by her stupidity he took to his bed for a week. A woman went to Los Angeles to interview Jack Nicholson and stayed a week. I think she took to his bed too.

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Unashamedly upper-middle class, in one column Jilly Cooper told how she had collapsed in Harrod’s during her ectopic pregnancy. The following week she wrote that her colleagues thought she had really collapsed in M&S and speedily taken a taxi to Harrod’s as a more suitable place to collapse.

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In April 1971 Gitta Sereny met Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, three months after a German court had sentenced him to life in prison; she interviewed him for 70 hours. He died of heart failure 17 hours later. Into That Darkness, her book based on those interviews and years of study of Nazi war crimes, is revealing and remarkable. Of Stangl’s death she says “He had not committed suicide. I think he had died because he had finally, however briefly, faced himself and told the truth; it was a monumental effort to reach that fleeting moment when he became the man he should have been.” May I suggest another cause of death – 70 hours of interview by Gitta.

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The door to the little sports office is flung open with a loud cry of “Ciao.” Enter Brian Glanville, maestrissimo of football writers. Slung over the shoulder of his half-on-half-off jacket is an ancient BOAC bag. Sartorial elegance is not his style. He collects his mail, most of it taking issue with things he wrote in last week’s paper. Reading it is not made easier by his spectacles, purchased for a few lei from a market stall on an international trip to Romania. He is very long-sighted, a fine gift for a football reporter. He puts the letters on the floor and reads them standing up.

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An annual highlight in the sports editor’s life was meeting with Keith Botsford and the managing editor to go through Keith’s expenses. After the 1982 football World Cup in Spain he attempted to claim for pipe tobacco but was cruelly rebuffed. His expenses for the Grand Prix season were an altogether bigger and more complex affair. The managing editor, Peter Roberts, went through them very carefully, as perhaps I should have done. Being Keith’s there would always be elements of mystery. “Where are the receipts for the Austrian Grand Prix?” asked Roberts. “Ah,” said Keith, “to save money for the paper I stayed in the house of an illiterate Austrian peasant so a receipt was impossible.”

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Peter Jenkins, our political columnist, was highly sophisticated and immensely well connected. He was a man at the centre of political life, both logistically and ideologically. He had been at The Guardian for 25 years. His writing there and at The Independent amounted to an authoritative insider account of those times. He did tell me that one evening during Labour Party Conference in Blackpool he and Alan Watkins of The Observer had a long conversation with Harold Wilson, the most inscrutable of Prime Ministers. They emerged thinking that at last they understood him. Elated, they drank much champagne and the following morning couldn’t remember anything Wilson had said.

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Martin Johnson, lifted from the Leicester Mercury, quickly became one of the sharpest, funniest and most unmissable of English sportswriters. Only on the eve of going to Australia to cover the 1986–7 Ashes series had he told sports editor Charlie Burgess that, as Leicestershire at Grace Road had been his beat, he had never been to a Test match (a fact Burgess kept from Andreas Whittam Smith’s ears). Within weeks Johnson had become legendary. After watching England’s dreadful performances in warm-up matches he wrote the “can’t bat, can’t bowl, can’t field” comment that helped provoke Mike Gatting’s team to win the Ashes.

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There were about ten round the table – at least three were legendary bastards, the others were from the advertising and other departments of the Mirror Group, the dire organisation that now ran the paper. Also present was the editor of The Independent. They were there to judge a radically new version of the Independent Magazine, devised by me. How many of those present would I have chosen as good judges? Probably none. It was a take-it-or-leave-it situation. If they didn’t take it, I’d be leaving.

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Though the Daily Express was in 1998 regarded as pretty much a basket case, it still had a special resonance for me. It had been the paper of my childhood. In the 1950s the Express – Daily and Sunday – were the only papers that came into our house. The Express sports pages were my daily diet. Henry Rose, who died in the 1958 Munich aircrash, and Desmond Hackett (“I’ll eat my brown bowler”) were my boyhood football mentors; cricket came to me via the Express; there were Roy Ullyett’s sports cartoons. On Sunday there was Alan Hoby (I don’t think I was ever interested in Rupert Bear). When I was little, did I even know that other newspapers existed? (My father spent a lot of time reading Exchange & Mart and we had Picture Post and Illustrated and Picturegoer but they weren’t exactly newspapers.) You might think it mad that childhood memories should have any effect on how a man in late-mid career feels about a potential employer – even a temporary one – but somehow it did.

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Sometimes, because of my odd choice of topics, it was predictable that I would be in a press-pack of one. After all, how many would have gone to Stockholm to write a long piece about the interment of Greta Garbo’s ashes? Actually I missed the event. Her family, Garboesquely concerned about prying cameras, buried her a day earlier than scheduled. How many, in summer 2001, trooped down to Margate to write an essay just because Ronnie Biggs, flying over the resort on the way back from Brazil to a British prison, said there’s nothing he’d love more than to have a pint there?

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Sales are a fraction of what they were, printing and distributing papers is obviously a hellishly expensive and slow way of communicating news and, of course, ecologically unforgivable. But heaven be praised! Physical newspapers survive. For many, especially those of us who tapped out copy on a typewriter before computers arrived, strove for the great headline that was a perfect fit, and knew hot-metal composing rooms, playing our part in the finicky and fabulous business of getting the edition away, a newspaper is an object of love.