Alan Cleaver worked on The Wycombe and South Bucks Star from 1985 to 1995. First as a reporter and - on the maxim that if you can't get rid of someone, promote them – ending as editor. He went on to work on The Times' internet operation and later to edit the Hampshire Chronicle. He’s now a freelance writer living in Whitehaven, Cumbria and for the price of a cup of coffee has kindly agreed to reflect on his days in the editor's chair at High Wycombe.

I STILL have very fond memories of the people and places around High Wycombe so was delighted when Steve Cohen offered me the chance to sit once more in an editor’s chair and wallow in nostalgia: happy days of running in the Wycombe Half Marathon, evening walks on The Rye, hours stuck in traffic jams on the London Road and late nights in the South Bucks Star offices at Gomm Road getting the paper out on the new-fangle Apple IIE computers.

I’d arrived at High Wycombe fresh from three years on the Spiritualist newspaper, Psychic News (pause for all the jokes about “I knew you were going to say that”).

My interest in the paranormal continued at High Wycombe however and I formed the Strange Folklore Society whose members investigated many of the legends and traditions in south Buckinghamshire: the Green Man of Fingest, the witch’s stone at Speen, the White Cross above Princes Risborough and its lesser known brother, the Bledlow Cross. We even revived momentarily the tradition of Beating the Bounds with a day’s walk around the old Chepping Wycombe boundary – and at key points ‘bouncing’ boys’ heads (gently!) on the Beating the Bounds box that had been preserved from the 1920s.

One of our most intriguing discoveries was the Hughenden Dragon – this dragon had been misfiled in High Wycombe library but investigation of the legend by member Clive Harper showed it was a genuine dragon story of old which had all but been forgotten. We received a very grateful letter from the British Dragon Society for our discovery.

There must be something particularly magical about the Hughenden Valley because it was also the sighting of a remarkable Green Man ghost.

But before this turns into an edition of Psychic News, if you want to find out any more dig out an old copy of the booklet Strange Wycombe which we published or visit my website www.strange britain.co.uk During my time at The Star, this thing called the internet came along. The managing director at the time – David Green – asked me to investigate it and see whether it might be something the company needed to consider. I set up a connection to the internet with the help of local company Rednet.

It wasn’t easy – in those days there was a Catch 22 problem: to log onto the internet you needed specialist software and this software was only available on the internet! The speed of the connection was just 14kbps (nowadays its measured in megabytes).

I explored the dozen or so websites then available on the internet – one of them was NASA but I was terrified I would click the wrong button and launch a space rocket. I excitedly told my partner, Lesley, that I could give her a weather forecast for Mars for tomorrow. She was unimpressed (particularly as she saw our first internet phone bill was £250 for the month!).

Indeed most people I spoke to about the internet were unimpressed: Only students and computer geeks can access it, critics argued. There’s nothing of any value on the internet (true at that time with just a few websites) and “No one will ever understand this http://www. stuff”).

The Wycombe & South Bucks Star has a place in the history of the internet. The Bucks Free Press Group’s computer engineer Rob Whittlesea helped staff on the Star build a website for the paper – it was the first English weekly paper to go on the web (indeed there would only have been a few hundred websites globally in those days).

During my time as editor of The Star, I penned a weekly ‘From the Editor’s Chair column’ which gave me a chance to swap gossip and chatter that wouldn’t fit so easily into the news pages. There were two ‘stars’ of my column: my cat Tippex and a boy called Lewis. Tippex was co-called because we ran a corrections column on the same page – in fact my cat’s true name was Trex (based on the old Carry On joke about the cat called Cooking Fat).

I still have a cartoon drawn by a reader who, on learning Trex was ill, sent a picture of the cat in a hospital bed!

Lewis was a friend of the family. A young boy who said those innocently humorous things only kids can say. There were many ‘Lewis’ tales but my favourite was the one in which he asked to bring a friend home for tea.

He told his mum none of the other children would play with this lad so mum, touched by his kindness, readily agreed. “But why won’t the others play with him?” she asked. “He’s got fleas”.

The Star had been built on a policy of ‘good news only’ by former editor Jeff Steeden. It proved very popular with the readers if not so welcome with hard-nosed journalists (Jeff did indeed once carry just one paragraph on a local murder). There was a rule that the front page had to have a picture of a cuddly animal or a cute baby. Fortunately the paper at that time employed the superb services of photographer Ann and John Priest who excelled at that type of picture. The next editor – Tim Blott – and then myself, gave the bad news more coverage but we both continued with a strong lead on happy or quirky stories.

My time at High Wycombe coincided with a great boom in the fortunes of Wycombe Wanderers. The club moved from its famous sloping pitch by the hospital to Adams Park and a young Martin O’Neill took the club to Wembley on more than one occasion.

I now live in Whitehaven, Cumbria so have not had the chance to pop into High Wycombe for at least 20 years. Has it changed for the better or worse I wonder?!

My corner of the world achieved notoriety for all the wrong reasons on June 2, 2010 when Derrick Bird went on a shooting rampage, killing 12 innocent people and then himself. The taxi rank where Darren Rewcastle was shot – the first public shooting by Bird – is almost literally outside my front door. I was at work at The Whitehaven News at the time which was two streets away so sat in the centre of the awful sequence of events that were to follow. One year on and June 2 was a time for reflection. A reflection on the lives lost and the families still hurting from the deaths of their loved ones. But also a time to reflect on the good that shone through that day: the strong community spirit and the way everyone did whatever they could to comfort and help. As one journalist said to me, “on that day we saw the worst that a man can do and the best that man can do”.