MY bags were packed. My desk was tidied. My farewells were said. I was ready to walk out of the door and leave my Bucks Free Press column forever.

But then two things happened that made me take my quill back out of the case and forced me to re-evaluate my life.

A voice from the wilderness touched my soul. Some readers asked me to reconsider my decision to retire, but their protests were too few to change my mind.

An 80-year-old sent me an appeal from the heart that altered everything.

I had complained last week that the public was too apathetic to protest about anything, and she confessed she was "guilty, guilty, guilty".

But the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of embarassment, has written to a newspaper for the first time in her life to urge me to stay on.

Her kind praise and gracious plea were quite humbling, and for the first time in ages I felt that my work did really matter.

The second event was a story being written by my colleague Kris Hall, a Free Press reporter. He had tried to use the new Freedom of Information Act to discover how many motorists had been fined on Marlow Hill, High Wycombe.

Unbelievably, the people who police speed cameras were able to refuse this request under an exemption to the new act. It just goes to show there is no freedom of information in this country.

I've decided the fight must go on.

We live in a secret, fettered society where the public simply cannot be trusted by the authorities to deal with simple, straightforward facts. Let battle continue. Mrs Mann calls this a late-life crisis, but I'm back.