I ONCE had a colleague on a newspaper, let's call him Jim. He was a really nice bloke, as kind as you could wish to meet. But, oh boy, was he methodical.

Jim lived in a neat bungalow, the mortgage on which was down to about £7.50 a month or something equally silly, and for many years - until his elevation to senior journalist position for the paper on which I was working at the time - he had been a court reporter with perfect shorthand.

He had neat hair with something on it that prevented it from moving, and he was the sort of bloke who would get upset if he drove into the public car park near the office in the morning and found someone else had parked in what he obviously liked to think of as "his" space.

It would be the start of a ruined day.

And on a ruined day, when he swept into the office exactly 25 minutes early (without fail), he would possibly also discover the diary in which he daily wrote in all the reporters' assignments or duties would not be in its rightful place on the news desk. From then on, things could only get worse.

"Eee, ruddy 'eck!" he would say. Jim came from the North.

And being from the North, Jim spoke exactly like the man in the Hovis advert featuring Gold Hill at Shaftesbury and a boy on a bike.

He had that same problem pronouncing the consonant "L", which I was once told is something to do with having a short tongue although I can't be sure of that.

But whatever the cause of his verbal difficulties, my arrival to work in his office caused him even more problems because the best he could manage with my name was to pronounce it "Poor Arren".

Under pressure, on a ruined day, Methodical Jim would be driven to use his one and only swear-word which, because of his glottal shortcoming, emerged as "bruddy."

When he was moved to utter "Eee bruddy 'eck, Poor!" you knew things were reaching boiling (or boiring) point and it was wise to get out of the office for five minutes while he simmered down again.

At lunchtime - no, that's too vague - at 1.05pm precisely, he would relinquish the desk and take his brown leather briefcase into a dusty and seldom-used glass partitioned area we grandly called The Interview Room.

The room was occasionally used as somewhere to put people who called into the front office and demanded to be interviewed about their spat with the DSS or the noisy neighbours, or perhaps their starring role in the Second World War.

But at 1.05 it became Jim's Room, where he opened his briefcase, unwrapped his four neat sandwiches, got out his flask of tea with plastic cup and unfolded the Daily Telegraph.

On my first day in the office, I made the mistake of joining him - just to be sociable- but I quickly realised my mistake.

His lack of willingness to respond to my conversational overtures with anything more than a Northern grunt made it quite clear I had invaded his space and it must not happen again.

After 35 minutes, having munched and supped his way through world events according to the Telegraph, he would fold his paper, stow his empty flask in his briefcase and head across the road to a local hotel bar, where he trusted he would be able to get his usual chair and drink two halves of light-and-bitter before returning to work.

Afternoons were spent largely on the process of organising the newsdesk diary for the following day's schedule, juggling the reporters' names and the jobs to be covered, and amending and re-amending with little bits of sticky paper until the perfect allocation had been achieved.

Then, at 5.01pm, he gathered up his briefcase and went home, come hell or high water.