So long, and thanks for all the fish

This column is my last for The Budapest Sun, and this is the last issue I shall edit. I am leaving the paper. The reasons behind that are not important. The fact is, as, perhaps, is a little of the history. To me, at least.I was hired a decade ago to re-invent the paper. The UK owners were concerned that it had become too much of a tabloid cliche, dominated by crime stories, sensations and sleaze (that much hasn’t changed). As one senior executive told me, it seemed like the paper was reporting on 1930s Chicago, rather than late 1990s Budapest, and the impression the paper created didn’t fit the reality on the ground.I arrived in Hungary on Sunday, Jan 5 1998, and the following day was thrown into the deep end, taking up my first editorship. What I sought to do then, and have tried to maintain ever since, is to unashamedly make The Sun a community newspaper, reporting to and for a disparate, largely expat readership who shared one common denominator: they could all communicate in English.
Although I had already worked in the UK for the company that owned The Sun for 12 years, I had no links with Hungary. I came here for the job, and because I believed in what the paper could be.
Since then, many of life’s great stages have been marked for me in public. The unlikely journey that brought me 1,000km from the southeast coast of England to Hungary, would find its match in a beautiful young lawyer, who had to leave her home town in Szeged and move to Budapest before we could meet on a blind date set up by two friends.
That passed by unseen, but our marriage, the birth of our daughter, and my father’s death after a 10-year battle with Alzeihmer’s were all recorded on these pages, and commented on by that readership community. Through the paper I have met many who have become close friends, and have been unstinting in their help and support in times of need. And I have been lucky enough to work with some of the legends of the Budapest publishing scene: Lucy Mallows; András Doncsev, who left us to become an adviser and speech writer for Viktor Orbán; design guru Chris Baron; cycle activist Greg Spencer; Charlie “Two Shoes” Szabó; snapper Gergely Rónai – who I still rate as one of the best photographers in the country; Kester Eddy; Adamant columnist Adam Lebor; Richard W Bruner, known to all as Dick and as fine a young gentleman as you could hope to meet.

Grateful

And there are the late lamented: Anita Altman, Márton Bürger (who died tragically young at 32), Duncan Shiels, and Carl Kovac. I knew and liked them all, but Carl and I, sharing a faintly absurd view of the world and sense of humor, were particularly close, despite the more than 30 years that separated us. I am still grateful that one of the last acts I was able to perform for him before his death, was to put one of his estranged children back in touch with him.
There have been serial letter writers such as Allan D Forrester, David Parker, Frederick Sweet, Nick Ricci, Peter Culleton, Peter Haley Dunne, and the unforgettable Mary Pôry.
Whether you agreed with them or not, they always had an opinion, and the passion to share it. They were the proof to me that we were connecting with our community.
It has been 10 years of hard work, but I am immensely proud of what we have achieved with a really quite small staff. With the BBJ having gone bi-weekly, The Sun is now the longest-standing English-language weekly on the market. It has been a privilege, and a pleasure, to edit this paper, which will, of course, continue to prosper. I will remain in Hungary, but try not to get in the way of Zsolt Balla, my deputy, who now succeeds me. I wish him, and The Budapest Sun, all the best for the future.
And, to quote from Tony Blair’s farewell speech to the UK Parliament, “I wish everyone, friend or foe, well and that is that, the end.” Except that it is not the end. It is the beginning.