Since moving to Norfolk writing has become an important creative outlet. Unfortunately the English teacher at my secondary modern thought my form was too poor to do English literature. As a result for many years I thought I was not up to the task.  For my solo show ‘Unstill Lives’ I exhibited extracts from journals and sketch books along side the pictures.  I’ve done this private writing for many years but when the reaction to the show included a lot of encouragement for the text I started to think seriously about publishing.

My first project was a guide to antiques, a ‘Collectors Guide to Inks, Glue Pots & Blacking Bottles 1750-1920’.  This will be published in 2006 I hope but it has led to my becoming editor of a collectables magazine called BBR.

The Sugar Pine

Making a path using a whippy stick to cut down the nettles - just as he had as a child - he looked for the partly destroyed paths of encaustic tiles. They had wound through the conservatory that had once been attached to the grand house. Between the heaps of rubble and newly blown down branches he kicked aside the detritus to reveal the grey, cream and maroon patterns. How easily the excavations of his childhood were brought into view again; a few minutes of pushing aside a thin leaf mould of ten years shows you the true picture of time. The blown heaps of autumn leaves, big enough to play in, to collect in huge drifts, melt and compress to the wafer thickness of a single insignificant year. In this ghost garden the 80 years since the house had been demolished were represented by maybe two centimetres. Nonetheless on such a thin layer huge colonies of yellow celandines, white wood anemones and blue bells had grown up like flowering memories. Almost undisturbed they had slowly spread to fill the triangle of land squeezed between the adjacent school and the park, a purposeless corner kept secret by accident of local authority acquisition and a six foot wire mesh fence. Children, like squirrels or rabbits, always found a way in - as indeed had he - squeezing through secret holes behind bushes. Today there was no need. The storm had sent bough after branch crashing onto it; whole trees had fallen outwards as if spilling the wood into the park beyond. He had once imagined the wood, animated and moving, doing something like this: a tide of ivy and wilderness creeping out to strangle, engulf and smother the hated semis and bungalows on its boundary. The storm had produced an effect more like an explosion. Throwing down the younger plantation oak trees that now spread in a fan towards the houses. It was as if the wood, so full of ghosts, unable to contain them any longer, like a forgotten volcano suddenly erupting, had blown apart.