As an avid reader of newspaper columns, the ones I’ve always looked forward to are the ones where something has gone wrong. You read fascinated, horrified, about families crumbling, a little night illness, a dog’s slow death. We’ve been poring over old issues of the Observer Magazine as we celebrate its 60th anniversary and, over the years, we’ve had plenty of memorable columns, some of which were expanded into books, some used as examples in spitty debates about the state of journalism, many ushering in a new kind of honesty. On this page, Kathryn Flett wrote about her husband breaking up with her, only for the columnist who took over from her, India Knight, to write, a year later, “Stop me if this sounds at all familiar, but my husband is leaving me.” Even now, more than 20 years later, I read it with a hand over my mouth.
For 50 weeks of the year, most columnists will tap out their cheery thoughts on, say, their love of baths or have you noticed how nobody smiles on the bus any more and then, one day, something awful happens and they share it and, having got to know them through the stories they tell about their cats or wives, you lean in.
