THIS week, I will be mostly discussing moving on.

I will be leaving journalism after more than a decade of late finishes, early starts, weekend working, thousands upon thousands of miles covering football from the Premier League down to the Evo-Stik Division One North, court cases, being sued - twice - being banned from a football ground, having doors slammed in my face, mastering and then losing the noble skill of shorthand, meeting footballing greats such as Jairzinho, Niall Quinn and Malaury Martin, interviewing Jimmy Montgomery, holding the FA Cup, playing and winning at St James' Park, playing and losing at the Riverside Stadium, conceding my last ever goal in football to John Carver, being shown how to play cricket by Paul Collingwood, catching a football one-handed while simultaneously conducting an interview with Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, and out-eating Sam Allardyce when both faced with a tray of mince pies.

So this will be my final column for The Northern Echo. Like all good things, I’m bringing my stint as a columnist to an end before everybody is sick of it.

To be honest, it’s nice to leave a job on good terms. I haven’t always been so fortunate. In fact, this, and my first job in the industry, are the only two roles where I haven’t left them in the lurch, been asked to leave or forcibly removed from the building.

I was sacked from a call centre job selling subscriptions for a large national newspaper after failing to make any phone calls in a single shift once. My argument at the time was that England were playing and that I presumed people would not appreciate me cold-calling them at the time.

I was right, as well. But the powers that be didn’t see it that way, so upon arriving for work the next day I was promptly frogmarched back out of the building, without the chance to say goodbye to the people I had no real feelings towards in the first place.

I was effectively sacked from another job, again in the call centre, when I went on a week-long spree of hanging up on people so that I didn’t have to do much work. I half-heartedly claimed it was a computer error, and I was placed on a final written warning but advised to resign if I wanted a good reference.

And two of my jobs I had while at university were binned off for entirely appropriate reasons, neither of which I can remember now. It is safe to say my work ethic has improved slightly.

The last day at work is always the most awkward. It’s basically a case of going through the motions. People are nice to you, safe in the knowledge they will probably never see you again.

You have to clear your desk, and see how many pieces of company property you can get away with taking. My bag upon my departure resembled a magpie’s nest. But you can never have too many staplers, notebooks or computer monitors, I have found.

Then there’s the clandestine whip-round. I’ve paid into enough leaving kitties over the years. And ran out of nice, yet slightly humorous messages to write in their leaving card. I saw one on Twitter last year that simply read “p*** off.”

I’d happily take that, to be honest.