Discovering The FT Weekend At 18 Changed My Life. It Might Change Yours Too, Whether You’re 18 or 88.

I was a Francophile in my youth. It was a happy coincidence I lived right across the road from Alliance Francaise, so I used to attend French classes there. One summer, there was this girl Audrey in my class whom I got along with well. She was funny and clever. During one of our chats, she told me how much she loves the FT Weekend. Odd. She doesn’t strike me as the sort who reads the Financial Times. She assured me the FT Weekend is nothing like the weekday edition. Encouraged me to check it out. And so I did. I’ve been a subscriber of the FT Weekend for twenty years now.

The FT Weekend is a delightful newspaper. The main paper covering International, Opinion, and Companies & Markets is alright. Kinda useful for the white collar sort. It’s the Life & Arts supplement where the FT Weekend comes into its own. I LOVE Life & Arts. The cover story of each Life & Arts supplement is inevitably esoteric, current and beautifully written. The title of this weekend’s cover story is ‘What’s in a name?’, about three men who masqueraded as a female writer and won Spain’s 2021 Premio Planeta. Last weekend’s was ‘Among the Taliban’, about the Taliban’s second age, as you might have guessed.

Then there’s Lunch with the FT, an interview of somebody who has done something sufficiently remarkable to warrant an FT journalist chatting with them over lunch and footing the bill for the meal. Over the last twenty years, I must have read hundreds of Lunch with the FT, too many to remember any particular one that stood out.

Then there’s Fashion. I can’t decide how much blame to put on the FT Weekend’s fashion spread for my disastrous attempt at starting a fashion label. You know what’s the worst thing about being a fashion entrepreneur? Pandering to the whims of twenty year old social media influencers. Too old for that shit, so I chucked it in.

I won’t bore you with a section by section analysis of the FT Weekend. Suffice to say Travel, Books, Arts, and Food & Drink are all fantastic. Actually, if you will just indulge me for a minute here, please let me rave about Jancis Robinson’s wine column. What I know about wine, I probably learnt most of it from her column in the FT Weekend.

And of course, there’s the How To Spend It pull out. As the title suggests, this is all about living the good life. It’s unabashedly bourgeois. Some people will call it posh. I love The Aesthete interview, in particular the questions ‘In My Fridge You’ll Always Find’, ‘The Place I Can’t Wait To Go Back To’, and ‘An Indulgence I Would Never Forgo’. It’s so interesting to be able to peek into the private lives of interesting people and know their favourite food, place and thing. From reading How To Spend It as a penniless 18 year old to reading it now as a middle aged man, it’s an indulgence I’ll never forgo.

So how did the FT Weekend change my life? Reading it week in week out fuelled my curiosity about the world and all the wonderful things we have on this earth. It gave me a love for the written word. It made me learn to respect artists, filmmakers, activists, farmers etc. And most of all, reading the FT Weekend made me realise there are so many ways to be successful in life, so many skills to learn, so many things to explore, the sooner we let kids discover their interests and passions, the better the chances of them growing up to be happy, fulfilled adults.