Well here I am again, having held onto the wreckage for another month. Can you believe how fast time passes these days, even when you are as lazy as me?

This week my journey through the mists of time will only take me less than a mile from my home, which will please my legs and blood pressure. However, I will need to travel back almost 50 years when those ailments and some others did not exist and I was a fine figure capable of running a mile in about two minutes. Then again perhaps that is failing memory or rose coloured glasses.

Imagine it is now 1970 and we are standing outside the impressive gates of the magnificent 110-acre MGM British Studios in Borehamwood. Well, that was the case for me 49 years ago. The studio had been closed just months earlier but I was able to persuade the property company that had purchased the site to let me visit .

They agreed but limited me to one weekend and so I reported to the gatehouse, which was manned by one security officer and a rather nasty guard dog. He said to me "Here are a set of keys and it is all yours because there is just you and me here and I have to stay at the gate."

Now imagine the feeling a film buff gets when left alone to roam a 110-acre studio that resembles a Mary Celeste. I remember standing on one giant sound stage, now silent for all time, knowing that Clark Gable romanced Grace Kelly here and this was the spot where the sets of 2001 once stood. I roamed the empty corridors and came across the make up department, where photographs of old stars were scattered on the floor and cloth samples for Ivanhoe still remained.

In another corridor I came across a room full of box files, and what tales they had to tell! I was only able to salvage some and they will feature in my book on MGM.

I entered the viewing theatres where the likes of John Ford and Stanley Kubrick had watched the rushes of their films. The projectors had been removed and the screens slashed.

After a while I ventured onto the massive backlot, where a street set and sets from The Dirty Dozen and other films still stood, now abandoned to the elements. If you want to get a flavour of what it looked like, check out an episode of the cult 1960s television series UFO. That series was based at a film studio, thus in one sequence they ride around the backlot sets.

I have three big regrets from this amazing experience and opportunity. I took only a few photographs, as this was before the digital camera and mobile phone cameras. I just had a standard camera which took 24 photos and I had to get them developed at Boots. Of course I also did not have access to a video camera.

My second regret is that I did not 'liberate' more photographs scattered around, or more of those files, which were all dumped into skips by the demolition company.

My third regret came in 1972 when I bumped into a chap in charge of demolishing the site, which had stood intact up until then. He said if I wrote an article for their staff magazine I could return to the studio and photograph it being demolished. I took some photos but my heart was not in it. Now here is the regret: He showed me a pile of scripts of films MGM had made at the facility and said I could buy them at £2 each. Younger readers may not believe this but in those days I was earning less than £20 a week so I had to decline. Also in my defence I must say there was not much of a market for such things back then, but today I imagine a script from, say, 2001 would sell well.

Well the backlot today is occupied by a housing estate that continues to grow. The 20 acres of buildings were demolished to make way for a cold storage plant, which is about to close to be replaced by who knows what. Those who worked at MGM are beginning to thin out, which is life. I am on that same path, which is why I want to write this book so that once this wonderful studio passes from living memory it will not be entirely lost in the mists of time. Until next time, it is over and out from me.