My rant to Jon Akass in the King and Keys gave him a few ideas for his column

DRINKS: Jon Akass in 1984

By PAT PRENTICE

THE reason I peruse The Drone every day is that it so regularly brings back memories of my sojourn in The Street of Adventure.

As a young buck in danger of being press-ganged into the ordained fleet of failed Fenmen, I was addicted to reading. I learned how to when Mum or Dad placed the old Daily Herald over the chimney breast to draw the flames up the chimney and make the fire work (see what I did there?)

I had to be quick because when it caught fire, the words rapidly rose up the blackened chimney.

I read the small headlines because the flames would soon make them really hot stories.

But before the blaze needed to be encouraged, Dad had coughed his way through every page and torn out the bits he would store to prove his little facts in any contentious conversation in the Red Cow taproom or with doorstep-visiting Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I had devoured the bigger stories.

One that really hooked me was the centre spread about coal mines with little coal trucks wandering on their tracks between pages. (I wasn't a toolmaker's son. My Dad wouldn't have been proud of making a tool).

When the old Sun arrived, there was Nancy Banks-Smith — whose son, I think, married the daughter of the greatest ever recalcitrant sub, Ron Gillings (hope I got that the right way round) — and Jon Akass. Also the best photograph or cartoon of the day.

Akass out-wrote everybody.

I have very few heroes.

Many years later, after a first edition of The Daily Telegraph which I had chief-subbed, I went for a livener before a second edition rejig to Andy's King and Keys.

As any former chief sub will tell you, with a head as crammed with bullshit as a force-fed paté duck is with swill, you rant about the idiocy of news to cleanse your brain in time for the second deadline.

On this arid and urgent occasion, an out-of-condition, slumped, possibly Brylcreem-slicked, combed-over toper leant sideways and murmured an inquiry between the bar and my thrusting, thirsty grasp.

In response, I hurriedly found myself flooding out my facts and opinions about tomorrow's idiocies and how they could be acted upon.

Not many hours later, I caught up with my hero Akass in his latest gypsy column. He was reporting what his friend in the pub had told him about happenings in the World, and what he thought about it.

He was quoting me.

For some time, as he changed jobs and earned a small fortune, which he richly deserved, we drank during my break and he told the World what the detritus of a jaded hack wanted to unburden from his deadline-destroyed memory.

I never told him that I was drinking with one of my heroes.

It probably wouldn't have been news to him anyway.

1 March, 2025