The heading on page 3 made my eyes bulge and sent my mind racing back a couple of decades to when I was the editor - 'Traffic blackspot'.

I am, of course, a relic of the days of the British Raj in India at the end of the Second World War. A dinosaur when it comes to technology and political correctness.

My upbringing was against the background of the mighty British Empire. "Send a gunboat" was a phrase trotted out whenever there was a little local problem beyond these shores.

I matured quickly. When the Intelligence Corps sent me to Peshawar as a 19-year-old to be in charge of Field Security on the Afghanistan border,I learned to drive up and down the Khyber Pass in a 15 hundredweight truck.

I lived alone in a bungalow and had a bearer in his 60s who had eight children and gratefully accepted the one rupee a week I paid him to tend to my chores (1s 6d in old money, folks). When I wanted something I shouted "Bearer"; he called me "Signy Sahib".

The sahib came home and joined a generation of job satisfied young journalists who knew that the printers were better paid but, on the whole, would have given their papers money to employ them to write stories.

We were fire engine chasers and made as much money from our Fleet Street freelance actities as we did from our masters in Church Road, Hendon. Hendon Court was second only to Bow Street for national coverage.

We had great contacts ... an essential for journalists. I remember photographer Rod Brewster, who went on to become editor of the Borehamwood Times, getting an early morning tip-off from a police 'mole' and he and I arriving on a murder scene at a nursery in Hendon Lane, Finchley, before the CID.

The first sign that you are getting old is when the policemen start to look young.Then it's the increasingly smaller print in the phone book and, in my case, the slip of a girl reporter who responded to my mention of Judy Garland at an editorial conference by asking who she was.

"Liza Minnelli's Mum", I hissed back at her in a way intended to send her spinning down the Yellow Brick Road.

In my time as editor Barnet had four Tory MPs, three of them in the Cabinet. Barnet Council comprised 43 Tory councillors and 17 Labour I recall our first black councillor, our first Asian magistrate and becoming aware that Patel was replacing Cohen as the 'in-name' in our leafy suburbs although anti-Semitism was still more of a problem than colour.

Then came political correctness and the day I was castigated for referring to an "accident blackspot" in a report of Hendon Road Safety Committee.

"Accident" was OK, I was told. "Spot" was acceptable ... minus the 'black' prefix.

As someone who had once attempted to 'blackball' an intended member of the Rotary Club of Hendon - "someone put his ball in the wrong hole," said the president, - I argued in a front page comment for the use of 'blackmail', 'blackbelt', 'black look' ... even for the 'blackcurrant' in my Lemsip. And, hey, what about 'whitewash' on the other side of the coin?

This was a big moment for me and the realisation that Dinosaur Den was in rapidly changing times. Eventually my name began appearing in the Times 50 Years Ago column; polite young reporters ring these days to ask for details about personalities or my contemporaries who have died.

I gave in to the PC issue relatively quietly. My feeling was that if I offended against the cult the police would come and drag me away. In a Black Maria, of course!