I grew up in a house full of newspapers as my father was a journalist who started his career on the Yorkshire Post. Among the many papers we received, the Manchester Guardian was the most important and I began reading it from about the age of nine.
In 1953 my husband and I with our small children moved to Nigeria and priority of course was to subscribe to the Manchester Guardian Weekly. Receiving it was always an enormous pleasure, no matter if it was three weeks late, arriving in some remote corner of northern Nigeria – the daily news we could learn from the BBC, but the commentary on that news was never out of date. We have been reading the Weekly ever since.
Living in a village in France for the last 30 years, our copy, after being well read by all the family, goes in to the English library which we run: important because it is rarely available on the local news stands.
Never wasted, the Weekly will eventually either be used to light our wood stove, or else in a new recycled life. My eldest son Paul makes pots which he fires in an earth kiln in the garden – very simple technology, with amazing results. He tells me that he uses one copy of the Weekly mixed with 20 litres of water, eventually mixed to make 30kg of clay.
So the Guardian Weekly lives on, 64 years after we first subscribed. Paul, who was born in 1953, gives it a distinctive new life.
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