they're probably what's made me so intensely interested in everything

Life The Observer wasn’t my first Sunday newspaper. That honour goes to The Sunday Times, which I read right the way through my teens. I loved the Culture section and used to keep them, piled up under my bed, the library/hoarders gene already taking hold. But after Hilsborough and a recognition that the paper was being published by the same office as that which shall not be named, I just stopped. And the back issues went for recycling.

By then I was in my late teens and in my sixth form at school. One of the perks was that the newspapers would be delivered to the common room (dontchaknow) and each morning a group of us would try and do The Guardian crossword which is when I first started reading the paper. Despite wavering now and then, trying The Independent for a week or The Telegraph, I always returned. It’s political philosophy wasn’t always something you could agree with, but in everything else it spoke my language.

The Observer, once the GMG had bought it in 1993, became the natural Sunday extension and I’ve been picking it up ever since. Similar to The Guardian, it has an ability to somehow find something interesting to say about something, anything. But as a report on tonight’s Newsnight underscored, it is in fact simplistic to simply call it The Sunday Guardian; there are ideological differences and its tastes are perhaps even slightly more up market, more literary. Yet I’m as passionate about it as I am the daily paper and with the threat of closure perhaps even more so.

I think I can probably say that I wouldn’t be the person I am without having read The Guardian or The Observer; sometimes both can be precocious and do idiotic things, sometimes they get things very wrong, but before the web they were the way I discovered that there was more going on in the world than I could see in my daily routine, theatre, music, art, cinema, foreign affairs, tattle, tittle. Collectively they're probably what's made me so intensely interested in everything, and it’s true to say I learnt more from those pages than I ever did at school.

I’ve become used to sitting in my lunch break on a Sunday and reading the magazine and review sections; Victoria Coren’s column, Mark Kermode’s dvd reviews, Jay Raynor’s restaurant reviews, the film and music features by the Kates, Tims and Miranda Sawyer (sometimes), the longer researched newsier pieces by Simon Garfield or Elizabeth Day glancing on into the Media section to Peter Preston and all of the things which I peek at in between. They’re akin to human versions of the finger in the old lottery ads, pointing to subjects which we readers might find interested in, golden nuggets.

The idea of none of that being there fills me with dread. Yes, dread. Because without The Observer there wouldn’t be a newspaper worth reading on a Sunday or at the very least a paper I would want to read. The Sunday Times is still owned by Murdoch (and we’ll leave the inconsistencies about that statement for another time). I’ve tried both The Telegraph and The Independent having bought them to get whatever dvd was being given away that week, and the former just seemed terribly up itself and the other felt like it was trying to ape the other papers broadsheet and middle market rather than just doing its own thing.

Is it possible to write an obituary for a newspaper? Would it be too meta? The Observer hasn’t closed yet, that decision is still amongst the range of options available to Guardian Media Group to plug the £90 million hole in their profits, so perhaps we can at least describe the paper as being on life support. And I’m right at its bedside, holding its hand, ipod tuned to whatever was trending in the last Music Monthly to keep it cheerful.