Looking at the floods, and thinking of the American presidential contest, suddenly reminded me this month of a little personal anniversary.

It is now 40 years since I first became a reporter.

Then, as now, large areas of Britain were inundated by water following one of the wettest autumns on record. Then, as now, the race between the Republican and Democratic candidates across the Atlantic was nailbitingly close.

But 40 years on and some 50 million words later, much else has changed. I started work on an inner London, family-owned weekly newspaper where the few copies sold each Friday were produced on a flat bed press. The broadsheet paper usually had ten pages and cost less than a penny in today's money.

Reporters did everything from proof reading and occasionally delivering the paper, to more pleasurable duties reviewing West End theatre productions. Between covering the council and the courts, I also wrote the sport which involved anything from home matches of Chelsea and Fulham to Sunday League cup finals on muddy park pitches.

The type was set by hand. If I put up what I thought to be a splendidly alliterative headline about super sizzling scorers, I would be told by the head printer it was impossible to set because there were not enough Ss. The ancient press was so inefficient that most copies of the paper had little strips of paper hanging from it like imperfect origami.

There was an editor (female) plus three reporters and an advertising manager who all inhabited the same room.

Within six months of my joining, the editor went on holiday leaving me, at the age of 18, in charge of the paper. Somehow I muddled through, accomplishing everything from laying out the front page to writing the opinion. Although my immediate predecessors included such luminaries as Michael Winner and Barry Norman (who both wrote to the editor and told her how right she was to sack them), there was no way in which the Kensington News and West London Times, or any other paper of that era, represented the golden age of journalism.

Old hacks have always talked about golden ages, usually about a generation ago so that their younger listeners cannot contradict it. But looking back at cuttings from papers of the early Sixties, ranging from national broadsheets to the Argus, what strikes me is how leaden the prose was and how unimaginative the layout.

Today's papers are not only far bigger than those of the past, but usually far better. The writing is crisper and sharper. The design, helped by new technology, is often bright and lively.

It's true that some of the fun and frolics of old newsrooms have disappeared. But newspapers have had to adapt to changing times, with the advent of television and the internet.

People sometimes ask me how I can report on the same old stories which come up year after year. It would be idle to pretend every one is exhilarating, although each is important to someone. But Brighton, let alone Sussex, is too big for any reporter to know intimately and there are always surprises.

I may be more cynical and knowledgeable than the ex-schoolboy who wrote about President Kennedy and as cases at the West London rent tribunal.

But new happenings can still fill me with wide-eyed wonderment and it's worth adding a few thousand more words to the others filed and then forgotten the day after they were written.