It is more than half a century since I began reading the Guardian Weekly. I immigrated to Canada in 1956 because, having seen the second world war from Paris, I became a pacifist and did not want to fight in Algeria.
This was the time of the cold war, of John Foster Dulles and senator McCarthy: North American media views were clearly not balanced. So I was delighted to discover the Guardian when I was at university. It was a ray of hope and nice to have some moral support when trying to stop the nuclear bomb race. All my career was in international trade and finance, a strange choice since I consider myself a socialist, but the pay was good and I travelled all over the world.
I was a bit of an iconoclast because I preferred the Guardian to the Financial Times. During that time, the Guardian helped me preserve most of my beliefs.
Mind you, my job did influence my views because I concluded regretfully that some of my favourite leftist journalists seemed to have difficulties understanding basic economics and business. They still do.
When I retired, my wife – who loves the literary section – and I decided to subscribe to GW and, for the first time, pay for it.
The Guardian still helps me keep some faith in human rights and democracy. It does not deal much with the growing social inequalities nor attempt to reduce the dangerous revival of war-like feelings toward Russia but I realise that ecology is now the fashion for progressive people and the Guardian, like other newspapers, has to please its audience. Unfortunately, there are more than one major problem in this world.
I now watch al-Jazeera, the BBC, the China Central Television and RT on the internet. Still, I always pay more attention to the Guardian’s views than to others. Maybe because it is well written by intelligent people or because it deals with many diverse subjects or simply because it is an old friend. I know it will be a sign of senility when I stop reading it.
If you would like to appear in this space, send a brief note to guardian.weekly@theguardian.com
