As a former Anglican priest, call centre worker and Harrods employee, I’ve had an eclectic working career. I’m originally from Wales but have lived all around the UK, before eventually settling in Birmingham.
I came to the Midlands to sort out my alcohol addiction in 2012, at a very low point in my life. Three sober and much happier years later, I’ve finally found my calling as the director of Shoots of Recovery, a social enterprise set up to help people recovering from addiction to rebuild their lives.
I was born into a Guardian and Observer-reading household. My mum worked on the same university newspaper as former editor Peter Preston, so it was the law in our house to read the Guardian.
Simon Hoggart and James Naughtie nurtured my early interest in politics, and later I adored columnists Nancy Banks-Smith and Frank Keating. The latter’s account of arriving in Llanelli to cover Carwyn James’ memorial service, only to be mistaken by the chapel deacon for a “very important journalist” from the somewhat more parochial South Wales Guardian, still makes me laugh now.
These days I follow the Guardian’s political journalists Michael White and Ellie Mae O’Hagan in the paper itself and on Twitter. I forward Owen Jones’s articles to my 16-year-old son in the hope that he changes his mind and political allegiances – all in vain so far.
I admit that I once deserted the Guardian for the Independent for a while (I found it “indescribably boring”, as Private Eye suggested I might), but I soon returned to the fold. I think that life without this great ally of life’s Edward Snowdens and foe of its Jonathan Aitkens would be much poorer for everyone, regardless of your worldview.
• If you would like to be interviewed in this space, send a brief note to good.to.meet.you@theguardian.com
