The only Daily Telegraph in my sack was for the vicar. The rest of my deliveries were The Northern Echo and the odd tabloid.
I also delivered an evening paper on a Thursday, had a Sunday round and for a while I delivered the Saturday night Pink paper with football results hot off the press.
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My son has had his name on the list for some time but we have just heard the sad news they are discontinuing the role of paper lads and lasses at our local paper shop.
I won’t preach to you dear reader as you have your paper but we need to get more of our friends to know what great value The Northern Echo is! Other papers are available…but not as good, obviously.
Alfie Joey Jr will not know the joy of getting up ridiculously early in all weathers, testing the durability of his collar bone under the strain of the bulging bag and he won’t experience the agony of trying to get a paper through a letterbox during winter with ink black, frozen cold fingers.
More importantly, until he gets his first job, he won’t know the excitement of getting £4 ( I know, FOUR ENGLISH POUNDS) to buy anything you want.
Most of my pals bought sweets as an immediate treat on Saturday payday, but I was always straight into the bakery at the top of Sudders Bank for a pie or pastie. MMMM!!!!
When the former voice of Newcastle United, radio commentator Mick Lowes realised we had a Thornley connection, the first thing he asked me was about that bakery!!! It really was the best. Greggs has never come close.
For me the paper round was more than a job, it was a rite of passage. Not glamorous, not hugely well-paid, but absolutely where I learned a bit of graft, consistency, how to deal with The Boss and work mates, and what it felt like to earn your own coppers and silver.
These days, that first step onto the ‘giz-a-job’ ladder is getting harder to find.
Yes, the high streets are struggling yet there are so many more shops, chains and retail parks than when I was a kid – Greggs, McDonalds, Nero, Starbucks, Costa, Card Factory, Clintons.
You would presume there would be jobs falling out of the trees for young people. However, youth unemployment is uncomfortably high and there’s also been a culture change.
16 and 17-year-olds, once the standard bearers of Saturday shifts and after-school hour jobs, are now competing with older applicants, many of whom have experience and can work the hours that school leavers cannot compete with.
Also, hiring someone young, who might need a bit of training, flexibility around school hours and providing more stringent (rightly so) safeguarding demands, it is now harder for businesses to create opportunities.
Could this mean a return to the jobs, schemes and rackets folk my age did?
I don’t want to get all ‘back in my day’, but….back in my day (sorry), there seemed to be an array of creative ways to earn a bit of cash.
I didn’t just have multiple paper rounds, I would also go carol singing (only at Christmas, I’m not mad!), had great fun turning over my headmaster’s garden (Mr Smith educated us in so many ways!), Penny For The Guy (young fans of Halloween are flabbergasted when you tell them this was our ‘Trick or Treat’), while others went tatie (potato) picking, or on milk rounds; both back breaking money spinners.
Therefore, I have been heartened by a local lad who pops to our door, like he has been imported from a 1970s time capsule as he cheerfully bounds up our cul de sac offering to ‘help’ in various ways; he makes a small fortune washing cars, selling pop, sunflower seeds and home-made cakes.
I call him ‘The Grafter’, much to the annoyance of my own children, who don’t fancy doing any of those things.
Of course, there are now opportunities to earn money online. My nieces are on their way to being minted through Vinted, although there was a lovely ‘incident’ where one niece got carried away and accidentally sold some of my brother’s shoes which were NOT for sale (story for another day).
So if you have kids or grandkids, I wish them all the best getting that first job. And if you run a firm where you need a spare pair of hands and don’t mind firming up the frameworks required, you’ll have no shortage of applicants!
