IT’S just over 12 months since I started this column and I was planning to call it a day.

It had been rather a long haul. I’d got up quite a few noses, plugged a lot of folk who deserved a bit of recognition and generally kept a watchful eye on Darwen and its people, many of whom I know.

I’ve slammed waste and jargon and pomposity and yobs and dog muck and bureaucracy and mad plans and lack of action.

I’ve welcomed a few things but bemoaned the death of pubs, poor facilities for the kids, the half-empty town centre, wastelands, traffic congestion and delays over the new academy and leisure centre.

I’ve spoken to a lot of folk who had a tale to tell.

Photographer Graham Dean, club singer Jamie Mac, bookie Steve Doran, entrepreneur Rod Aldridge, head teacher Mark Standen, market trader Clive Wilson, councillor Michael Johnson, retiring landlord Stuart Walsh, new landlord Terry Whalley, property developer Rob Hollingworth and many more.

And I’ve written columns that I rather modestly thought weren’t bad; perhaps three or four which I’d had time to carefully polish.

I hesitate to mention the wonderful Oscar Wilde in the same paragraph as my humble self but he once said languidly that in the morning, while reading through a piece he had just written, he inserted a comma.

In the afternoon he took it out again. Writing can sure be hell.

My favourite column out of well over 50 was written on Remembrance Day last year.

I told of two Darwen lads who were taken by the Great War.

One was Lt. Edward Deakin Ashton whose wealthy parents lived in the magnificent Ellerslie off Bury Fold Lane; the other was my grandfather, Pte John Albert Harwood who lived in a humble terrace house across town in a soot-grimed and cobbled street off Sudellside.

Lt Ashton was killed on the first day of the months-long Battle of the Somme while leading an attack on Thiepval Ridge; my grandfather’s left knee was shattered by machine gun fire and he died in agony six years later.

His leg had been pinned by two large carpenter’s nails hammered criss-cross through the bones.

I recalled telling my youngest granddaughter about the brave soldiers and then we got to talking about the yobs who had, that weekend, damaged the slide and the carousel at the children’s playground at Blacksnape.

“Why did they do that?” she asked.

I wrote: “I couldn’t begin to explain. How do you draw a contrast, for a child, between the ignorant young scum of today and those brave Darwen lads of yesteryear?”

Anyhow, I’ve decided to continue with the column for a while but in a slightly different form.

I’ll be talking to a local lad or lass and giving them an opportunity to chat about themselves and about their town.

I’ll also be recalling some of the characters I’ve known; the wag and the chancer, the sportsman and the businessman, the worthy and the ordinary.

All of them, in some way, will have made their contribution to our town of Darwen.