BEST of luck to my colleague John Avison, who retired last Friday amid a sea of pies and pasties from A R Jones.

At 62, he was one of the more senior members of the newsroom, although he didn’t look it.

One of the last people old enough to have benefited from a ‘proper’ education, John was the kind of person you could turn to – as I did a few weeks ago – to find out whether to use ‘who’ or ‘whom’ in a certain sentence.

Avo served three stints aboard the good ship Examiner, chalking up 30 years in total as reporter, sub-editor, features writer, letters page compiler and columnist.

John has contributed a lot to the Examiner over three decades, not just on the page but in the newsroom where his laughter was such a common sound.

But, I’m afraid to say that amid his achievements, Avo has left one poisonous legacy for this newspaper: Barry Gibson, columnist.

It was back in the halcyon days of 2007. Steve McClaren was England manager, Gordon Brown was about to get the keys to Number 10 and John was off on holiday to South Africa.

The editor was good enough to ask Yours Truly, then but a slip of a lad of 27, to take on Avo’s column for the fortnight.

This I duly did with a couple of opinion pieces which I haven’t looked at for a while but which I can only assume were thoroughly adequate.

My fortnight done, I expected to hand the reins back to a suitably sun-tanned Avo. But it turned out that John had the good grace to fall down a storm-drain in South Africa, injuring his leg in the process.

With Avo out of action for a month, I carried on with my weekly rants until I eventually landed a permanent slot every Wednesday with John returning to his Thursday berth.

The rest, as they say, is history – albeit of the relatively minor sort.

I’ve attracted my fair share of criticism in the last half-decade of column-writing. Some of it has been reasoned and polite.

On other occasions it’s been anonymous and threatening – the purest form of cowardice.

But to all my many detractors – from the English Defence League, to Kirklees Council, to monarchists, to the religious of all persuasions – I have just two words for you: Blame Avo.