Garth George: This new pensioner's knocking off work to carry bricks

Tomorrow I attain the ripe old age of 65 and officially become an Old Age Pensioner or, for those who are a bit sensitive, a national superannuitant.

And since my birthday this year happens to fall on a Friday, I decided it was an appropriate day to retire after the best part of 17 years at the Herald.

Now before tens of thousands of you throw your hands in the air and begin to cheer, and tens of thousands more begin to weep into their cornflakes, I can tell you that this column will continue to be published each Thursday, at least until the end of the year.

I had intended tomorrow to be the day, too, when I rang down the curtain on nearly 47 years as a newspaper journalist, got out of Auckland and settled in Gisborne to become a beach bum and a student of Maori language and culture, for which I have developed a fascination.

But that is not to be - at least not yet. Instead I have agreed to become editor of the independent, non-denominational Christian newspaper, Challenge Weekly - for the second time in my life.

Back in 1980, at the urging of Wyn Fountain, an elder of the church I attended, and after talking things over at length with Challenge Weekly's veteran publisher, John Massam, I left the Auckland Star to become news editor of the ailing journal and toiled there happily for four years.

A few weeks ago I had a cup of coffee with Mr Massam - now an old and dear friend - and discovered that this unique newspaper is once again under threat because of a lack of someone with the skills to guide its enthusiastic but youthful editorial team.

So after talking it over with my wife, we agreed we would stay in Auckland while I took on the editorship of Challenge Weekly, which is fondly described by Mr Massam as "God's press release to the nation" and which should be as much part of every Christian home as daily prayers and weekly church attendance.

We hear much of what the churches aren't doing and how the nation is going to hell in a handcart, but we hear little of what churches and parachurch organisations are helping to achieve in the lives of thousands of New Zealanders from North Cape to the Bluff week in and week out.

And that information is the staple diet of Challenge Weekly's coverage - the good news of God's kingdom on Earth.

But in the meantime I contemplate my departure from the Herald with more than a little trepidation, for I have lived in daily newspaper newsrooms for nearly all my working life and I really don't know how I will cope outside that environment.

There is something unique about a daily newspaper newsroom and the men and women who inhabit it.

If you asked me to define it, I couldn't, but it is a benign and comfortable place with an ambience all its own, even at the most hectic of times.

It is, of course, a far different place from the one I first entered at the Southland Times in Invercargill back in 1958. In fact, I don't know what some of my long-gone colleagues would make of it should they be able to come back to visit.

There are no typewriters, no copy paper, no vacuum tubes, no printers down the passage. There are no linotype machines clacking away in the background, no inky-fingered compositors putting handfuls of lead type into steel forms, no stereotypers churning out lead plates to put on the press or clichegraphs carving photographic images on to metal plates.

All there is today is floor after floor of computer terminal workstations and the loudest noise is the clicking of computer keys generated by those of us who learned to type on manual typewriters and whose keyboard touch remains a tad heavier than required.

And the ultimate upshot of all this almost incomprehensible development in newspaper technology is that I and many of my colleagues do in a few minutes what once took at least four tradesmen several hours.

And we get only one tradesman's pay.

Another significant development in newspaper journalism has been its literal invasion by members of the fairer sex. In my early days and for years after, the only women in the trade were lady editors and their assistants and the editor's secretary (who nowadays is his PA).

In the Herald's vast newsroom today at any given time there will be roughly as many females as males. I'm told the Herald editorial ratio is 60:40 but often it seems more than that.

I have to admit that this, more than the technology changes, took some time to adapt to - I am, after all, the product of my upbringing, education and enculturation - but today I wouldn't have it any other way.

The women who choose journalism as a career - and the way things are going they will soon outnumber the men - have done nothing but enhance the craft, as they have so many trades and professions from which they were once largely excluded.

So when sometime tomorrow I depart the Herald newsroom for the last time I know I will not miss the work - for of late it has become tiresome - but I will sorely miss the people, particularly those who, both male and female, like me are newspapermen from their dandruff to their toenails.