Snapshots which capture a moment in time

The #MeAt20 hashtag has had everyone digging out photos of themselves from years - decades - ago.

The images of our younger self may reveal dodgy haircuts and questionable tastes in clothing, but they are more than just snapshots from the past.

What would the 20-year old me make of the 56-year old version currently trying to find a sane way through a pandemic which has changed every single aspect of how we live today?

At 20, I was a trainee/junior reporter on the Cumnock Chronicle in Ayrshire - a mining town that became my home for five years.

I was living in digs in a room on the top floor of an old house which overlooked the town square, while waiting on a place of my own getting sorted.

Weekends were spent travelling back to Edinburgh, or nights out in Ayr or Kilmarnock, with the occasional swally in the Dumfries Arms.

Each week, after the paper appeared, we had the Thursday Club where the staff decamped to the Royal Hotel for a drink. Sometimes two, occasionally three, and, every so often a full-on session until chucking out time.

I worked weekends, covering junior football where clubs such as Auchinleck Talbot and Cumnock Juniors regularly pulled in crowds in excess of many senior Scottish teams.

Local derbies between the two - neighbouring mining towns with little love for each other - were intense, full-throttle affairs.

When Talbot won the cup, all the old women draped black and gold scarves round their shopping trolleys before boarding the bus to Cumnock, and when we turned the front page of the paper to their colours, we got protests. Real, serious protests including one bunch of fans who said they'd buy all the papers and burn them on the parking ground opposite the office.

They once banned me for cracking a joke at their expense too - so we threatened to cover the games from the top of the bing next to the ground. Ban rescinded!

The 20-year old me spent a year covering the miners' strike of 1984 -from picket lines to soup kitchens to set piece rallies when 10,000 marched with Arthur Scargill and Mick McGahey through the town on glorious summer's day; sitting in the home of the first miner to break the strike, an exhausted man who just wanted to do right for his family;  and scary moments when secondary pickets from Nottingham blocked our car from getting into the pit by bouncing it back out of the entrance!

And the 20-year old me gained a lifelong love of design thanks to my editor, Alex Clark who taught me everything about how to create a newspaper.  

His rules still apply nigh on 40 years later,  because they work; the pace and balance of the pages, the mix of content, how to use images and, most important of all, the front page was your shop window - dress it as well as you can.

I went to Cumnock knowing next to nothing about newspapers (heck, next to nothing to about life outside Wester Hailes in Edinburgh).

I'd never heard of the town and struggled to find it on a map as I traced the road down through deepest south Ayrshire, but it became a place I loved. 

It was a place that worked hard down the pit, and played harder, but it also had a strong sense of community and belonging.

And it had good people who helped you, looked out for you and, when need, gave you a kick up the backside when it was needed.

The 20-year me owes so much to them, if not everything.