Although I first encountered it as an intimidatingly dense weekly at my Quaker boarding school, my re-acquaintance with the Guardian Weekly came in 1963. It was a year’s subscription and a wedding present from my college chaplain at St Catharine’s, when, newly married, Tineke and I left Cambridge to work for an agricultural project founded by Seretse Khama’s uncle, Tshekedi in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. This later became Botswana, with Seretse its first president in 1966.
That oh-so-light air mail edition reached us at a speed that should shame today’s post offices. Project-worker Fish met the nightly mixed goods on his bike at our siding on the Cape to Cairo railway and brought it the 4km to our mud-and-thatch rondavel.
And what a week’s good read it was! Tineke, now a homeopath, loves the What I’m Really Thinking column best, while my fondest memory is reading Nancy Banks-Smith’s television review despite the remoteness of that medium. Even the sports pages always kept me interested, albeit while I was on a dusty roadside waiting for a lift.
Now, after an almost continuous 54 years, it’s still our newspaper, still takes a week to read with its news, reviews and analyses at a breadth and depth not even matched by the hour-long Channel 4 News, for we now have television here in Gloucestershire – and electricity, too!
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