I was born in November 1935, the third child of John and Sadie Currie. My early memories are of wartime Manchester and nights in the communal air raid shelter. We moved to Cheadle Hulme in Cheshire and I became aware that my parents were active members of the Labour party, and much involved in the coming election in 1945. I sat at the kitchen table copying addresses on to envelopes. I would have been about nine and my writing must have been much better than it is now.
Of course Labour won a landslide victory. In a few short years it created the NHS and the welfare state and rebuilt the education system as suggested in the 1944 Education Act. The last 30 years has seen all this destroyed in an accelerating process akin to watching Isis blowing up the treasured monuments of Palmyra.
I do not remember the then-Manchester Guardian in those early years but it was certainly there by my teens. There was also the Reynolds News on Sundays, which I think was a Co-op publication. At 17 I was a photography student in Manchester and this photograph shows me reading the Guardian from that time, 1952 or 1953. The turning point for me was the 1956 Suez scandal, when the Guardian’s principled stand led to many readers cancelling the paper – and I fell in love with it.
At 80, through 56 years of happy marriage to Rita, and bringing up four children, I still read it every day. It has the best columnists, both in the quality of the writing and the logic and passion of their views. To mention just a few, Nancy Banks-Smith’s A month in Ambridge puts a smile on my face; Polly Toynbee fires me up with her righteous anger; Simon Jenkins makes me think from his slightly rightwing viewpoint; Marina Hyde puts my hair on end (yes, I still have it) with her murderous stiletto wit.
The cryptic crossword helps to exercise my brain cells, I actually complete it about twice a month. Sudoku is boring but addictive. The only other paper worth reading is the Telegraph, and I leave that job to my older brother.
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