July 31st is always a date that sticks in my mind. It's the day I left newspapers to plough my own media furrow.

It was July 31st 2009 when I walked out of the The Scotsman building at the bottom of Holyrood Road, now occupied by Rockstar North.

There are lots of very good memories of working there - and some not-so-great ones too. I'm not going to go all misty-eyed over how amazing newspaper journalism was 'back in the day'. The truth was, it was sometimes shit - and no day was without its stresses, strains, tantrums and tiaras. Actually, there were no tiaras.

Another thing I won't do is tell you that it was a brilliant time to leave - just before the shit really hit the fan and newspapers started 'downsizing' (aka getting rid of staff), having failed to grasp the scale of the challenge from webland.

Nope. I was no visionary. I left for the same reason most people leave jobs voluntarily - an assessment of a messy range of professional, personal and financial factors and then a best guess at what to do.

It was a leap of faith in many ways, but it's turned out OK.

Do I miss newspapers? Not really. Did/do I ever look back? Not often.

Was self-employment a bed of roses? Of course not.

However, walking out of that door (and across the road into what was The Tun for my leaving do) was right for me at the time - although the range of beer choices was very limited, I recall.

But rather than blabbing on about all the stuff I've done since, just one thought….

When you emerge from a media environment (especially news), you have far more skills than you realise. You will be very good at spinning multiple plates, and you can probably write, edit, summarise, shape and present words - on pretty much any subject - in a way that will make you employable out in the world.

In other news, July 31st is now (for obvious reasons) the end of my tax year. Doing a tax return and paying corporation tax is one of the less fun things of self-employed life. But like most new things, you bumble through it for a while and then get the drift, or get a good accountant (ideally one who speaks English and not Jibber-Jabber.)

I might have some more fundamental thoughts when I get to 15 years out in 2024, or 20 years in 2029. Maybe I'll have retired by then and be able to spend even more time in rowing boats, or staring moodily at the camera with boats in the background.

Alternatively, according to anyone who knows me, I'll still be ploughing on.