Above: shades of the 1930s. My copy of the Guardian reporting over 3 million out of work, January 1982

I can’t be sure when I first read the Guardian. So the headline of this post is rather more definitive than the evidence justifies. Thanks to his job running PR for the old South Glamorgan county council in Cardiff, my father brought a stack of papers home each day, including the Guardian, South Wales Echo and Western Mail. I vividly remember announcing, rather awkwardly, one evening that I would start reading the papers, as well as calling my parents Mum and Dad, rather than Mummy and Daddy. This declaration was some time before I went to Cardiff High School aged 11 in September 1975. So let’s take that as evidence enough.

One of my favourite early Guardian memories was the famous San Serriffe April fool of 1977. This spoof was the newspaper equivalent of the BBC’s famous 1957 Panorama spoof story about the year’s bumper crop from Switzerland’s spaghetti trees. I remember poring over the Guardian’s seven page travel supplement about the tropical islands of San Serriffe. As the paper explained in 2012, everything connected with San Serriffe was named after printing and typesetting terms.

The Guardian is famous as a writers’ paper. Matthew Engel, a fine writer on cricket and much more, once noted how the paper allowed its journalists to retain their intellectual freedom, unlike those on other titles. As a student I enjoyed reading an even more famous Guardian cricket writer, John Arlott, whose weekly wine column introduced me to Rioja.