In June 1980, I was all set to qualify as a solicitor and work in Wolverhampton. Five months later, I was living in Merowe, a small village three days north of Khartoum, and working as a teacher in the local secondary school. That became a love affair with the Middle East, my home for most of the last 35 years.
There was no electricity or running water but copies of the Guardian Weekly would arrive in spurts, thanks to a subscription from a fellow teacher’s thoughtful aunt. They were treated like bankable currency, passed from hand-to-hand in the village and then in the school, before being used as cigarette paper.
Thus began a long, and occasionally rocky, relationship. I have always tried to find a source for the Weekly whenever I moved to a new country. In Cairo I bought from the same street salesman in Tahrir Square. In Damascus, copies were smuggled in from Lebanon, no mean feat in the mid-1980s. In Riyadh, copies were heavily censored, often to the point of mutilation, with pictures and passages snipped out, giving an origami effect.
I am waiting for the day that Seumas Milne cracks a joke and my partner takes the precaution of snipping out the irritating title of Oliver Burkeman’s column, which hasn’t changed my life so far. Quite unlike my experience of having lived with Sudanese peasants, who would share their last food with strangers.
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