My connection with the Guardian started about 40 years ago when I was a pupil at Dulwich College in London. My late father read the paper at home, and I would later read it at school, encouraged by my form teacher, Bob Jope. The Observer helped me win a scholarship in 1976; when I was interviewed I had already read a feature on Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
As one of the few pupils at the school with political views that diverged from what I call the Thatcherite consensus, I revelled in Steve Bell’s If cartoon strips.
The Guardian has been an essential source of trusted and progressive news. It has often felt as though I’ve been in a minority of one reading it, from school days at Dulwich to working in public accounting and then in the mining industry in Australia. Since 2008, though, I’ve been working in the not-for-profit sector and the people around me see the Guardian as essential reading too. I’m intending to share my copy of the Guardian Weekly around; I think there’s a certain pleasure in taking the time over a printed publication that browsing online can’t replicate.
