I am a 61-year-old retired teacher living in Brecon, Wales. I have been reading the Guardian Weekly since 1986. In that year I started a teaching job in the Dominican Republic, and with only the BBC World Service as a source of news, I was very pleased when a colleague showed me his Guardian Weekly, which I hadn’t known existed. I soon became a subscriber, and kept up my subscription through jobs in eight other countries.
Each week I looked forward to the arrival of the paper, though in the Dominican Republic, Ukraine, Kenya and Laos its arrival was pretty erratic. In Mexico, the US, Germany and Italy its arrival was a bit more dependable.
As a teacher of history and the theory of knowledge in international schools, the Weekly was a lifesaver: I used hundreds of articles, reviews and pictures from it for my teaching over those years. I think there are thousands of students who have been introduced to different points of view through the Weekly.
Then and now, it takes me a week to read – I’ve never felt the need for any other papers. I enjoy the international news articles and the Comment & Debate section best. I’ve always found the book reviews interesting, and read many books based on those reviews, but unfortunately there seem to be fewer reviews of novels now than there used to be.
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