While looking through copies of the Diss Express during my eight-year stint in the deputy editor's chair, it is amazing to see the many changes which have occured in this area.
When I first rolled into Diss, Tesco was nowhere to be seen and Morrisons was still a Safeway.
The Waterfront was still The Sun and my favourite lunchtime haunt for a good few years was Revolution Records, a music shop the envy of my Norwich frien
ds.
However, technology and the recession has affected not only this paper but the very fabric of the town.
The Diss Express luckily leapt onboard the internet train, but Revolution Records was killed off by the glut of cyber-record shops, eBay and supermarkets' "get everything under one roof approach".
Now it's my turn to "get out of town" and while I won't miss the infernal jams on Victoria Road or the frankly bizarre number of charity shops which litter Mere Street, there is plenty of things I will.
Not many of the places I have worked have had as wonderful view as that of the Mere and the Park. The job I had before was based next to a Cambridge sewage plant, so I was rarely tempted to venture outdoors for obvious reasons!
With the help of colleagues past and present, I have loved keeping you all up to date with the developments both in the locality but internationally – as in the case of 9/11, when the paper scooped its rivals and provided a vital local angle when a former Diss reader sent us photos of their office – overlooking the aftermath of that terrorist atrocity.
However, life moves on, and although I have been dragged into an uncertain future against my will because of the plummeting pound, I will always have fond memories of Diss to carry me through to the better times ahead.
