ONCE upon a grumbling time, there were two columnists on The Yorkshire Evening Press. They sat at the right-hand corner of the commentators’ gallery to deliver their copy.

One day, the editor decided it would be good to hire someone to raise a voice from the other end of the box.

And so began my more or less accidental sideline as a columnist. Twenty years ago this week, my first despatch was printed.

Some months later, on October 19, 1990, someone wrote what was neither the first nor indeed the last letter to the editor. As it was short, I shall quote it in full: “I am somewhat surprised that recent letters from some of your readers express concern about the political bias and vicious bigotry of John Potts and Peter Mullen. Surely this is counterbalanced by the fulminations of your columnist Julian Cole!”

Well, M Heather of Clifton Place, York, you perhaps had a point. As, too, did L Carr, of Unity Grove, Harrogate, who wrote at greater length the following month, wondering whether I found everything and everyone to be a “pain in the neck”.

As it happened, Mr, Mrs or Miss Carr influenced me in ways they never knew.

For I realised that while some things were indeed a pain, not everything was – and that made me pause before spilling into indignant ink.

That letter writer did say it made a nice change when I introduced my small son into the column.

That lad is now 21, six foot two, has a degree in forensic science and wants to study medicine – information I pass on only to convey the passage of time. He also has a brother and a sister, who have not been around for as long as this column has.

Eventually, the other commentating gentlemen left the gallery: John Potts died and Peter Mullen moved on to other spheres.

On a national scale, prime ministers have come and gone while these dispatches have trundled on.

Margaret Thatcher was still at Number Ten when I began my little diatribes. She received a bit of an ideological kicking from these quarters, where she was known as Mrs Hacksaw; for which observations wrathful indignation sometimes fell upon my “leftie” head.

But it all seems distant now: so distant that young Tony Blair was seven years away from becoming prime minister and hadn’t even fallen out with his friend Gordon Brown; and David Cameron wasn’t long out of Oxford and the Bullingdon Club.

In York, the Barbican opened around the time this column first appeared, but has not aged as well – providing a gap in life that has prompted more than a column or two in protest.

Matters large and small, important and perfectly inconsequential have detained me in what, by a rough calculation, must be approaching 950 columns. The cuttings reveal that I was defending the BBC two decades ago – and both topic and inclination remain, as I still like to add my small voice to the barbarian calls to belittle or dismantle what, for all its faults, remains something good about being British.

Or it does if you ask me, and that’s columns for you: one person’s thoughts, observations or perceptions given brief and unfair prominence above all others. And then forgotten about, even by the writer: I pasted these columns in a book for a while, but stopped years ago, so only a few yellowed examples remain at home. Maybe they’ll give the children a chuckle one day.

The best part of this grumpy discipline comes when people let you know what they think. Once they had to go to the trouble of buying a stamp. Now, they can hurl abuse anonymously on the internet; or say nice things incognito, which occasionally they do.

To anyone who has been reading these thoughts so far, thanks for that. It’s always been fun and still remains so. No single living person has read them all, not even my wife, and she is contractually obliged.

Normal service will be resumed next week.