Life and death, widgets and wars: Peter Rhodes on 50 years in journalism

A little milestone. Fifty years ago today, a few days after the 1969 moon landings I walked into a large and intimidating room with "Editorial" on the door, was shown to a desk with an ancient Royal typewriter on it and began my career in journalism.

Half a century and about 8,000 interviews and 12 million words later, I like to think I made the right choice.

Back in '69 the Press was associated with chain-smoking and liquid lunches and, according to my school careers master, was notoriously insecure. With an air of great authority, he'd recommended an apprenticeship in widget-making in the car industry for a long, safe career. I am still hacking away. The "safe" widget factories vanished years ago.

Just turned 18, I entered the world of courts, inquests, golden weddings, pools wins, dog shows, missing cats, champion marrows, UFO sightings, council meetings and all the other stuff of small-town life.

I was the youngest of half-a-dozen reporters. I loved their sparky, irreverent company, their ability to balance a fag and pint while dictating copy over the phone.The job seemed one long laugh.

Until one sunny afternoon some weeks after I started when I was sent with a photographer to cover a farm fire. We met a fire officer in the lane. "Much up?" asked the photographer. "Fatal," replied the officer. Some moments you never forget. After 50 years that single word still marks the instant when the game turned serious. As an old hack told me at the time, just because somebody wakes up fit and healthy in the morning, it's no guarantee they will last the day.

I moved on and up to big newspapers with wider horizons. In Hong Kong I ventured into the sweating, claustrophic, crime-riddled interior of the Walled City of Kowloon, long since demolished as a shameful legacy of Empire.

In Sri Lanka, as civil war broke out, a man led me to the ditch, still oily with body fluids, where his friend had been hacked to pieces by neighbours who had lived peacefully with him for years. In Jerusalem as the first intifada erupted, I went to write about tourism and ended up interviewing the PLO as they rejoiced at killing Jewish soldiers.

In the frozen Arctic, I watched a rescue team pleading with the explorer Pen Hadow to give up his trek to the North Pole and come home (he declined). In the Maldives after the 2004 tsunami, shellshocked villagers told me how the waters swept over their island and three children were never seen again.

In the madness of the Balkans, I was on the RAF Hercules that braved the Serb guns and flew into the airfield to break the siege of Sarajevo. Job done.

And then there were the celebrities, the princes, the paupers and all the other countless players in 50 years spent watching this world and turning events into keystrokes.

I could have churned out widgets. I chose to churn out words. And I couldn't have done any of it without the support of many editors, wonderful colleagues and some great readers. My thanks.