Why I cut out and keep all my columns, Ian McMillan

I’ve been doing this for years and I’m beginning to think that the box is some kind of mystical portal to another universe because no matter how many columns I stuff in, it never seems to get full. Every so often someone (well, my wife) will reorganise the box a bit so that the columns can fit in less haphazardly but after a while I just carry on thrusting them in and the box is still only about three-quarters full.

The question is, why do I save the columns? For one thing, the columns are there on my computer anyway, so if I wanted to refer to them I could just search the haunted wing of my hard drive, and for another thing, I’ve always believed that the joy of a column, a bit like a tweet or a football chant, is that it’s ephemeral. It burns brightly for a moment, for the few minutes you take to read it on the bus or on the settee, and then it’s gone. Journalism may be the first draft of history, as the old saying goes, but it’s just that: a draft, a thought, a glimpse. And then we’re on to the next one: the next column, the next idea, the next joke, the next whimsical paragraph.

And yet, and yet, because I save them in The Bottomless Box, you can tell that I don’t really believe that stuff. I want the columns to be immortal, not disposable, and for me that goes back a long way. I remember as a teenager borrowing books of collected and selected newspaper and magazine columns from the library; these were often by American writers or sometimes they were from British writers who plied their trade in publications like Punch and somehow for me there was something important about these collections; they reflected how someone was thinking over a year and by extension they reflected how the world was thinking over that year.

I started to make my own collections of columns, cutting them out of the Yorkshire Post and sticking them in a scrapbook I got from Mrs Parry’s shop. Older readers will remember those wonderfully funny Jake Thackeray columns and the daily column that I seem to remember was called Northerner, and later Northerner 2; I read them, marvelled at them, and stuck them in scrapbooks. Years later I would find the scrapbooks when I was clearing out a wardrobe and I would reread the column and marvel at the way they created delight day after day, week after week. These throwaway pieces of literary art are great examples of language under pressure, ideas with a deadline breathing down their neck and with the knowledge that you’ve got to come up with something else the next day or the next week.

So I cut the column out and put it away for posterity. Years ago when I made my will I made my son Andrew my literary executor when I go. He thinks he’ll be in charge of valuable literary manuscripts; well, he will in a way. They’re all stuffed into that box.