I'll be at the Conservative Party Conference this week - speaking at a Times fringe meeting as it happens, where I'll be generating a gaffe, split, row or some such to keep things merry in the press room. Party conferences only take up about four days now (less than the length of a Test match) although there is more chance of seeing someone stumped every few minutes or caught out embarrassingly with nothing to show for it than at a Test match.

Nevertheless, despite their limited duration, conferences are viewed by all manner of organisations as the ideal time to lobby politicians. Speaking as one (albeit one of limited experience and a profile so low I was mistaken for Zammo Maguire, the heroin addict from Grange Hill, in a recent public recognition exercise), can I say how foolish it is to lobby us this week. However lazy we are, we're never busier. Fixing a meeting with a politician during party conference is like organising a bridge four during an air cavalry swoop over enemy-held mountain ranges. It would be lovely, but people have other things on their mind. So, apologies if you're the chap from the Campaign for Real Whist - can we meet next week?

Of all the things I've done that will seem inconceivably strange and distant to my children (playing football in the street, eating sweetie cigarettes, watching Aberdeen Football Club triumph in Europe), there will be one experience they simply won't be able to conceptualise - I was once a reporter on ITV regional news.

This autumn the final bong is sounding for several of the existing ITV regional news programmes and many fear that the writing is on the interactive video wall for the rest of them. If indeed their fate is sealed then I will be one of millions who mourn their passing. But with a personal sense of loss.

For two quite magical summers in the early Nineties I was a reporter for, respectively, Grampian and Scottish Television. In those days ITV regional news was in its late imperial phase, already in decline, what with cable and satellite beginning their journey to ascendancy, but still looking to the outside world like a gloriously permanent feature of the landscape. And, as with the British Empire, life followed a prescribed and highly traditional path. Every bulletin ended with an “and finally” item of ineffable quirkiness, normally featuring a cute animal in extraordinary surroundings. And, what with my Oxford degree and all, I became, for two summers, Scotland's leading “and finally” correspondent.

I travelled to Oban to interview the owners of the Highland tortoise that had forgotten how to hibernate, ventured to Wester Hailes, one of Edinburgh's more intriguing new housing developments, to see how a family of five had managed to train their monkey to wash the windows in their tenement block and, in the East End of Glasgow, I scooped Fleet Street to secure an exclusive interview with the Birdman of Barlanark, West Central Scotland's leading budgie breeder. John Simpson, eat your heart out.

My role in regional news, like the role of Lord Chamberlain or Black Rod, had been passed on, scarcely changed through the ages, as have many other broadcasting traditions. The “and finally” items are always introduced with a wry smile or a suppressed giggle by one of two classic presenter types - the man of the world or his niece. It is a given of regional TV news that it will be presented by an older man who will always be partnered with a younger woman, the duo looking curiously like a company director and his executive assistant dressed for dinner at a sales conference in a hotel off the M6.

But for all the traditions that united regional TV news, each station also had its own cherishable quirkiness, and now my favourite, Border, faces extinction along with several others. Like the end of music hall and the death of variety, it is all too, too sad for words.

We had hoped to bring pictures now of a cockatiel that has learnt the whole of the Tamworth Manifesto to mark the return of the Conservative Party Conference to the West Midlands, but the gremlins have got in the way.

Instead, can I recommend that rare thing - an original, readable, compelling book about economic depression and how politicians can make things worse. The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes is a counterintuitive study of the Wall Street Crash and how politics turned chaos into crisis. Reading it, you're reminded of the words of Swift: “...whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.”

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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