ONCE in the city of Bristol there was a boy of three years old. Early one morning he fell from a first-floor bedroom window, a window painted shut, so how it opened nobody ever could say. The boy stood up and rang the doorbell, blood dripping from his injured head.

I have no memory of falling from that window, although I do recall being in hospital and returning home to a cake made by a neighbour, a cake with toy animals standing in the icing. To this day one side of my forehead has a slight dent.

This incident bubbled up recently while reading Life After Life, the novel by Kate Atkinson. Her heroine, Ursula Todd, is given many chances at life, dying and living again and again, until she finally gets it right. The point being, I guess, that our lives map out that way, with turns made or not made, directions followed or ignored, as we scuttle through the corridors dodging whatever fate rolls our way.

Some days after the accident, there was another knock at the door. A reporter stood there asking questions about what had happened. My mother swore at him and shut the door, but perhaps the reporter had the last laugh, as the injured boy grew up to be a journalist.

Anyway, I was given another chance to get life right and a few years later the family moved to a cul-de-sac south of Manchester, days before Christmas, presents and all. I lived there for ten years until university and London called. Student days came and went, and after a false start or two, I ended up working on a newspaper in Deptford in south east London for ten years.

A newspaper in Bristol offered me a job, but I turned them down because I had also had a part-time job at The Observer which was exciting, and because I had met someone, which was exciting too.

Sometime later, that someone became my wife, a son was born and we moved to York. I had a new job on the features desk of this newspaper, arriving in the Coney Street offices on July 11, 1988, to be met by the tall and rather imperious editor, who had interviewed me, asking who I was. Years later, someone told me that he had been talking of having hired a smart young sub-editor from London.

In those days the features department was by the window overlooking the river (turn right up the stairs in City Screen York and you are there, the old white tiles being one of few reminders of that building’s earlier role).

I was only going to be in York for a while. Other versions of me ran off in different directions, hot-footing it to glory.

Then one year became another, one child became two and then three, life intervened and the lovely city of York became home.

Two years after arriving, the imperious editor offered me a column. He wanted a left-wing antidote to the columnists of the day and I was happy to give it a go. The brief suited, especially through the years of attacking Mrs Hacksaw (Thatcher to the more respectful).

Not only politics has been my thing, God almost anything and everything has been brushed up against over the past 25 years, but the political has often bobbed to the surface, too often perhaps.

All things come to an end and now sadly this column is no more. Pushing words and ideas around this space has been a pleasure and a privilege. Sometimes readers have been pleased, sometimes annoyed, and sometimes they have taken no notice at all – the cruellest fate for a columnist.

If I’d chosen Bristol over York, would I have ended up as a columnist? Once I was interviewed for a job on The Scotsman, another time for one in Liverpool, so many different fates and futures awaited, with or without a column attached, but this was the one that solidified into a life.

And now, suddenly, after all those years and all the words, my job at The Press has gone and along with it this weekly column. If you have been reading, your kind attention has been welcome.

I don’t know what I’ll do now, but after tomorrow another life awaits, and there are still bills to pay. Wish me well and, wiping away a tear, I’ll wish you well in return.