There is a pretty good chance that the words “Christmas double issue” mean something to you. Possibly they even mean a lot. If they do then you’re thinking of Radio Times for certain, maybe also TVTimes and if they don’t then you’re thinking eh?

For the past 46 years, Radio Times magazine has produced a double issue of television and radio listings covering Christmas and New Year fortnight. Anything that lasts that many years, and looks set to continue forever, is going to build up a certain history but RT was at the heart of Christmas. It’s not unreasonable to say that Christmas wasn’t Christmas without Radio Times. I don’t think it is so special or important any more, I think the fondness we have for this issue is momentum from when it was usually the best and sometimes the only way to know what was on TV.

It’s the biggest-selling issue of the year by far and certain planning for it begins in January. That’s logistical planning to do with the print runs and the distribution. Editorial planning begins much later and I’ve completely forgotten when.

Even though I spent many years at Radio Times, chiefly on the website but also often writing for the magazine, I can’t remember when it all begins. I just remember that there is a stretch of weeks when you’re working on the regular weekly magazine plus the Christmas one. It’s known as pickup and I do not know why. Because you have to pick up the pace? I don’t know.

Pickup is exhausting and I’m thinking of all this now partly because the 2015 one should be out this weekend but also because there was a photo on Facebook of RT people working late into the night. I’d forgotten the exhaustion. Not that I ever truly experienced it to the extent the full time staff did.

But when I was writing their On This Day television history column, there was a point around late November when I would have to deliver five weeks’ worth in one go to meet all the various deadlines. That wasn’t easy.

Then – I can look back at this fondly because it was a long time ago but actually I was quite fond of it at the time – the Radio Times website used to have its own pickup period. Being online, the site’s pickup period used to begin the moment the magazine’s one finished. And for a couple of rather glorious years, I used to work on the magazine’s pickup and then immediately swap over the site’s one. Loved it.

I’d have to ask before I could tell you with any confidence when I left Radio Times but it has to be a lot of years ago now. And yet if you get the Christmas Double Issue and you look very, very hard, you will find my name and an entire 100 words I wrote.

I’ll take that. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas for me if I weren’t in the Double Issue.

Damn him, he was right. At midnight on my 21st birthday, this fella sat me down in front of him, crouched very close and told me that because he was doing this, I would always remember that moment, I would always remember him.

It felt a bit invasive, really, and I have some small pleasure in telling you that I remember the moment, I remember the room, the house, the woman next door I had a crush on, I remember everything except who in the hell he was. I can’t quite recall his face, can’t quite forget it either. So he’s in my head but as if with one foot in my noggin, one foot not.

I can’t decide if that’s better than my 30th of which I can’t remember a single thing. I’ve been pretty good ageing one year a time and in the right sequence but if you told me I’d skipped my 30th, I’d believe you.

My 40th is easy: I was in shock. Not because of the age, I’m not one of these people who get bothered by a number, but because of my wife Angela Gallagher. My teenage self would be startled that I was married, my sophisticated 40-year-old self was agog that she was still with me, but that wasn’t the shock. The true, honestly put-me-into-trauma-shock was that she surprised me with a trip to New York City. It’s my favourite place in the world and I did not see that coming.

Listen, I think you see where this is going and I think you see full well that actually I am one of those people who get bothered by a number. I wasn’t. But I am now. As I write this, I’m 49 and when you read it, I will be at least 50. Could be older if you’re a slow reader or if all that survives of the 21st century is this chat with you. But at least 50.

I have found it hard. I am finding it hard. I could do you a CV and it would sound okay. I can tell you that I am half the writer I wanted to be but, truly, I’ll take that – so long as this isn’t the end and my writing is still in progress.

It’s not even as if I simply feel old. I do, though. I was working with a school recently when an 8-year-old called me a ‘random unfamous guy with no dress sense’. I’ve also recently been described as a looking like an English teacher or ‘everybody’s favourite Geography teacher’. One guy thought I was a professor and didn’t mean it as an insult, I think he even fancied me. (Still got it, eh? I’m asking you seriously: I can’t tell. Can never tell.)

And none of these things are bad plus the fact that people have descriptions of me is profoundly flattering. Even the bad opinions, it means I am somehow in people’s heads. Briefly, no doubt, but there. Considering that I just assume that when I’ve left a room, I am gone from people’s minds, I am warmed by all this. Warmed by English or Geography, warmed by it all.

Only, they’re wrong. How can they be so wrong? I’m not a professor or a lecturer or an adult: I am 17 and I haven’t done anything yet.

That is a big, recurring thing with me that does not need a 50th birthday to be in my mind: the sense that I have only just started, that I have so much to do and, yes, not a giant amount of time left in which to do it.

So clearly I should get on with it, shouldn’t I? Except I wanted to tell you something. On my birthday I will be in Paris, my other favourite place in the world and while I get that these are not great times for the city, the time and the space means a lot to me.

And so does this. When I remember my 50th, it will be a memory of me crouching down to look you in the face and telling me that I will always remember talking to you right here.

So I was using the new iPad Pro the other day and was handed the new Apple Pencil. I thought this was a sily name for a stylus but no, it’s the right name. Maybe because it was handed to me before I asked, maybe because my mind was on trying out the Smart Keyboard instead, I said thank you and scribbled something on the iPad’s screen. That’s nice. And then took a moment and a blink realise that it wasn’t paper and I wasn’t holding an actual pencil. This new device is that transparant, is that natural and normal. Immediately.

You know how parcel delivery firms get to sign your name on their touch screen devices and the entire world recognises that no one will ever recognise that scrawl as being yours or anyone else’s? I wrote my signature and it was my signature. It was terrible and awful and embarrassing, but it was precisely my signature.

It’s just that somehow this makes me want to confess to you something about the terrible and the awful handwriting. It makes me want to get something off my chest and maybe even atone for it. Maybe it’s doing that writing on the iPad Pro, maybe it’s the news of Terry Wogan having to miss Children in Need for the first time since the 1980s, but I minded today of my handwriting.

Specifically of my handwriting during Children in Need. I can’t remember the year now but the odds are that it was late 1980s or early 1990s and I got invited to work on Children in Need at BBC Pebble Mill. Can you imagine the thrill of being included at the heart of this in the MIdlands? I was giddy.

All I did was sit in Pebble Mill taking pledge calls. I can’t remember where in the building, I can’t picture any detail, except I can hear the voice of a caller saying she’d pledge £10 if someone would publish her book. There’s a thing with the BBC that everyone pays the licence fee so everyone pays for this service so you can’t be rude or even curt with anyone. But on Children in Need night, she was taking up time that another caller could’ve been using to give us their credit card numbers.

Or in theory they could. My other memory of that first night, apart from a great sense of becoming bone tired by the end of it, is of a producer taking me to one side. Oh, this is decades ago now and the agony of telling you this.

She patiently explained that if we can’t read the credit card numbers, we can’t get money from them. And she patiently explained getting money was the entire point of the charity night. You could bristle at her patiently explaining, you could resent being treated as an imbecile – but I couldn’t disagree that my handwriting was that bad and I deserved every syllable.

There you go. My handwriting cost the BBC some money. Let’s go further: my handwriting lowered the total, stopped Children in Need doing all it hoped. Let’s not go so far as to say that lives could’ve been saved if I my 9 was decipherable from my 7. Please.

I was asked back the next year but they kept me off the phones. Anyway. To donate to Children in Need without risking your credit card to me or any other scribbler, go online here.

Last week I had a lifetime ambition fulfilled when drama I wrote was aired on BBC Radio. What I didn’t realise when I told you this was that there was a second ambition fulfilled – and that it throws me back to an ambition I had in the 1990s.

Specifically this. I can picture myself walking down a street reading the latest issue of Radio Times which had The Simpsons on the cover and a feature on the inside about the new RT website. I was deeply, gratingly self-kickingly disappointed: given what I knew and what I was doing, that was the website I should’ve been working on and I’d missed it. That was 1996 and as it happens, the website missed its launch date by a week. The things you remember, eh?

Within a year, I think, certainly not much more than that, I was working on that website. That meant working with the website team but also with the magazine: I can very clearly picture the first editorial meeting I sat in. It was in a boardroom that no longer exists – wait, I worked in BBC Pebble Mill and they knocked it down, I worked in BBC Television Centre and they knocked it down. This was BBC Woodlands and it was demolished years ago.

I’m not going to think about that. Woodlands was the one that deserved to be demolished. Leave it at that. But before the wrecking balls came, there were these regular meetings in a board room that had glass cabinets holding all of Radio Times. All of it. Bound copies going back to 1923. It was a marvellous little meeting room. Not an exciting one really, have a look for yourself.

I have no idea whose water bottle that is. Looks far too healthy to be mine. And the room looks small and dark. But then it was. Nothing special, except for that collection which extends past the camera to maybe six or seven cases, and for the people who’d meet in there. I thought I knew my television drama but, whoa, I had no candles to hold next to this lot.

As part of the work I did get to write bits that went in the magazine, the odd line, I can’t even remember what but nothing that earned me a byline. Until the issue of 25 September – 1 October 1999. I’d written a short piece about websites or something and I can remember sitting on a coach in Victoria Station when I got the call. My then website editor Rebecca phoned to tell me I was getting a byline. She knew how important this was to me.

Still is. I can tell you that date because I have the issue still, sixteen years later. I just turned around at my desk and took it off the shelf to check. That was the first time my name was in Radio Times and it wasn’t the last. Far from it. My most recent was about two weeks ago, I think, so all these years on I still get in there. I’ve been trying to work it out and I can account for at least a thousand bylines over those years.

Lots of things I’m proud to have written, many things that were just ordinary, pedestrian, required-but-not-special, and a few things I’d like to rewrite now.

I just have to say that I’ve got a bit used to having bylines in this magazine, I am used to seeing my name there. Until last week.

Last week it was an enormous, enormous jolt seeing my name. Because for the first time, my name wasn’t next to a Radio Times article I’d written, it was in the description of a programme in the magazine’s listings pages. Doctor Who: Doing Time got a little paragraph in the radio pages and there I am.

Here I am.

I didn’t expect that. As comprehensive as Radio Times is – show me any other magazine that covers all these channels in such detail, especially the radio ones – my Doctor Who was airing on a digital-only station. I didn’t think about it but if I had done, I’d have reckoned the listing would read “18:00 Doctor Who” and that would be that. Instead, I got that full paragraph.

Alan Plater once said in an interview that it was a big moment getting his name in Radio Times. He said it was a big psychological moment for all writers, it meant something. All these years later, and in a rather smaller way than Alan ever did, I got listed in RT for my drama and yes. It means something big to me.

So does this. The magazine is of course very pressed for space but they chose to give room for this listing and they chose to because it was me. I emailed to say how gigantic a moment this was for me and they wrote back saying they’d been thrilled I had a radio drama on. Laurence Joyce, David Oppedisano and Jane Anderson. They told me this and I put my hand to my chest. So touched.