Colin's column confessions 'MY FAMILY HAS FORGIVEN ME!

Colin Hogg looks back on four decades of laughs, tears and tales he's shared with our readers

- Donna Fleming

'It's like having a whole bunch of aunties and nanas and sisters who are interested in my life'

It started out 40 years ago as a six-week trial. Colin Hogg was a music journalist at the Auckland Star newspaper and in his downtime, he'd share anecdotes about his four-year-old daughter Summer with a colleague in the office next door.

"She said, 'You should write this stuff down, write a column,'" recalls Colin. Editor Keith Aitken gave him the go-ahead to try it for six weeks and the columns seemed to go down quite well.

"So I asked if I could keep going and he said, 'No, I gave you six weeks, that's it.'"

But all was not lost. A staff member at the Weekly had been reading Colin's take on life with a preschooler and asked if he'd like to continue his column in the magazine. He jumped at the chance and so began an association with this magazine that has now spanned four decades. He's had a few breaks in that time - voluntary and involuntary - but is delighted to still be sharing his insights with the Weekly's readers, who he describes as "a special breed".

"It's like having a whole bunch of aunties and nanas and sisters who are gentle and caring, and interested in my life. It's great," he says.

Colin's column Living with Summer started out in 1982 as a dad's take on his relationship with his daughter, then morphed into more general musings about life from a bloke's point of view. That was pretty unusual at the time for a women's magazine, and while readers enjoyed it, some of Colin's newspaper colleagues gave him a hard time.