I started reading the Guardian in 1959 – that should give you a clue to how old I am. I began buying the newspaper when I lived in Manchester – it was the Manchester Guardian then and reflected the progressive ideals I believed in, covering all the goings-on at the time, including the anti-apartheid movement (though, I thought, there wasn’t enough about CND, which I am still a member of). It was much thinner then and much, much cheaper and was delivered to the house before breakfast, as was the post and the milk.
I was widowed young with four children. I’d struggle to say what I did for a living, I’ve never had a particular profession. I’ve done lots of things – I’ve been involved in activism, run a craft centre, run drama classes and workshops and written plays and theatre reviews. There’s also the babysitting – or childminding as they call it now (I have 11 grandchildren).
I love the Review section, I always read that first, and I do the crossword (the idiot’s one, not the cryptic one). I’ll admit that the Travel and the Sport get recycled straight away. I used to get the Guardian every day but now that it’s so big I tend to only get it on Saturdays. If it moved back up to Manchester, though, I might go back to buying it every day. The paper’s coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid has given me pause – I like him and his politics. As a country, we’ve been through hard times before, and it hasn’t stopped us. Just look at the Labour victory in 1945. It gave us the NHS and the welfare state. I lived through it all. People always ask me how old I am, perhaps because I cycle everywhere. They always think I’m younger than I am.
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