You get some slightly surreal moments as a journalist from time to time. I had one at the weekend.

There I was working hard to make the necessary preparations for Monday’s edition (all right, I was sat with a cup of coffee watching France rip Italy apart in the rugby and wondering if I could get home before England v Scotland started) when a voice with a very recognisable regional dialect rang out.

“What’s da score?” came the Scouse twang.

I looked around to see a large man standing next to someone who looked remarkably like that Jim Royle off of the telly.

Flustered, I replied: “Err…27-3 I think.”

“No, the Liverpool score,” the larger man said.

Doh!

“Oh, nil-nil. It’s finished.”

The one who looked like Jim Royle was NOT happy.

“That’s b….. c….” he said. Only where I’ve put dots he put the rest of the words.

And that was it. Off he went. The day I met Ricky Tomlinson.

One for the autobiography, don’t you think?

YOUR COMMENTS:

So the Shropshire Star joins the Ricky Tomlinson Adoration Society. What an insult to the local men like my father who were seriously injured in the flying pickets building site furore. Not even a mention – Tomlinson has even gone so far as to say that nobody was hurt in the events.
What naive journalism. There are two sides to the story but it seems the media only wants to listen to Tomlinson – smacks of sycophantic groupiedom to me. My father never worked again as a result of his injuries and the effect of the violence he witnessed but then he’s not able to manipulate the media.
Tomlinson, for all his self-proclaimed working class hero stance, has gained much, much more and lost precious little. I will never buy another copy of the Shropshire Star again.
Heather