Memoir - How would you know...

A to Z 2025 Challenge, Dad, Draughtsman/Designer

April 4, 2025April 4, 2025humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

Dad

In the ever-ongoing debate over Nature v. Nurture, at least with Nature we can now examine DNA to see what assortment of benefits and disbenefits we have inherited from our parents – trying to assess what our legacy is from parental Nurture is more difficult, often abstract and can take years to become apparent either to ourselves or to others but if there is a single physical artefact that points to what I received from my father, it could well be this scale ruler.

My dad was a lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oxford, what some people would call “an Academic” but as he was wont to point out – to most of the world, the word “academic” means irrelevant and he tried always to be relevant. Eschewing the flashy temptations of much new technology, my father, Stuart Swinford Wilson, moved increasingly towards Intermediate or Appropriate Technology which is based on the idea that if you give a tractor to a village in the developing world, you may put half the village out of work but if you give them an improved spade, say, the village will flourish. Of course a spade is hard to improve on, though when I lived in Ireland for ten years, I learned that the long-handled, lozenge-shaped shovel in use there, is far superior to the short-handled, square shovel used in England. Further back in time, Brunel, on being asked to introduce his railways to France, discovered that labourers still used wooden shovels which were so hard to use that Brunel promptly brought in his army os Irish “navvies” to show them how it should be d0ne…

Back to the Scale Ruler – although the 1:1 scale on it is in millimetres, all the other scales – 1:100, 1:20, 1:200 etc. are used by Designers, Architects and Map-makers to measure things on drawings at different scales. Influenced by my father’s work, I took the option of Technical Drawing at school and once I attained sufficient skill, my father invited me to produce illustrations for his various projects and in doing so, switched on my designer “gene” (not to be confused with “designer jeans”!).

A sketch idea of a manual (and bipedal) sawmill – typical of the Intermediate Technology projects I illustrated for my father as I grew up in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

My father’s first contribution to design, and arguably the most far-reaching, was to design the first commercially produced GRP (fibreglass) sailing dinghy. A keen member of the Oxford Univesity Yaught Club, their sailing venue was the oxbow snaking, large tree-banked Thames at Port Meadow where shallows on the inside of every bend and flukey winds due to the trees, made for challenging sailing and though it produced good sailors who could turn on a sixpence at close quarters, it was hard on the Firefly dinghies which disintegrated after a few years punishment. Reading about the new material, GRP, my father, working with Bossoms boatbuilders, designed the Alpha sailing dinghy setting the precedent for the way most subsequent GRP boats would be made with a moulded top and bottom joined together to seal in the flotation. There were no departments to assist University staff to develop, patent and profit from their inventions back in those days, so others took the Alpha forward, learning from the experience to produce the more widely known Bosun, which I believe served as a sailing trainer in the Royal Navy amongst others.

The OxTrike was the ultimate Intermediate design my father pursued. Cycle rickshaws are often just a bicycle welded to a rickshaw but this engineer designed version has many advantages but requires little more skill to put together…

The pedals send a single chain back to a modified Sturmey Archer gear box with a pair of chains going back to two half axles, each with it’s own free-wheel sprocket meaning there is a limited differential action. Sturmey Archer refused to take up the idea and most cycle-rickshaws that are factory made today, have DeRailleur gears with all their attendant problems… Talk to me in the comments if you want more information.

So as my father moved towards a more ethical view of design, he and I would talk, often whilst sharing the washing and drying-up and from these talks, my own humanist philosophy grew into being as well as a critical view of the direction of travel of the modern world – see here for a critique of the cult of the car and our approach to the electric vehicle “Time to Divorce the Car”. One thing that happened that my father didn’t know the impact of, followed his being invited to write an article on Bicycle Technology for Scientific American. A chance introduction at his college – St. Cross, where he was a founder member, led to the invitation and it’s fair to say that my father was unaware of the prestigious nature of this publication. In those pre-internet days, the publishers sent a box (1500) reprints of the article, to the author and directed all enquiries to them to deal with – none of the immediacy of commenting that we now enjoy, and one person in particular, had a strong reaction to the article that never reached my father. A few years ago, watching the film “Steve Jobs” – there was a scene where Jobs was talking to the Apple Chairman about an article he had just read about bicycles. My ears pricked up!. In the article, my father included a graph by Vance A. Tucker of Duke University in which he ranked the energy efficiency among man and other animals of their travelling, per gram, per kilometer. It showed that the energy consumption of a man on a bicycle was one fifth that of an unaided man walking – all of which led Steve Jobs to formulate what would become one of his favourite sayings – as he explained to his Chairman “The computer is like a bicycle for the mind!”

The cover of Scientific American highlighting my father’s article – note the price!

There is much that I could say about my father, but there is one thing that reflects on the more personal aspect of him and of his relationship with my mother – she never really liked his beard although when you see how prominent it was when they met (below left) – it was obviously not sufficient obstacle to their engagement, however, she pressed him to gradually whittle it down and on the way back from Australia after an absence from oxford and friends, of some eight months, she finally triumphed and the beard was gone…

Left, my father (with my beaming mother) throwing a shape aboard a yacht in about 1954. Centre, on the SS Northern Star shortly before shaving off his beard altogether. Right, finally clean shaven…

Draughtsman/Designer

My technical drawing skills came in handy once I finally found my way into Signwriting which I practised for some 17 years. Computer-cut signs were in their ascendancy but I was strictly a hand-painted signwriter and this involves a lot of drawing out on paper before transferring the design to the sign board, but more of that under “S”. Then in 1999, I had a car crash and broke my hip and thereafter I couldn’t work up a ladder as I had been doing. I painted a few large scale murals using a scissor-lift platform but a change of direction was necessary. An architect friend who lectured at Sligo Institute of Technology, got me taken on as a part-time lecturer in Modelmaking on the Interior Design School. This course came under the auspices of the Engineering Department and so I found myself following in my father’s footsteps… Whilst there, I first learned and then immediately taught (as teachers do), AutoCAD – Computer Aided Design a programme used to design anything from the intricacies of a Silicon Chip to the layout of an entire city but mostly engineering and architectural drawings. Teaching an evening class, one of the students, realising the task would be too great for him, asked me to design and get planning for a house he wanted to build. Since there is no qualification needed to do such a thing – I agreed and completed the task. He and his wife decided not to move after all and sold the design and land on to someone who did build the house, albeit having butchered the design somewhat (a common fate of architect-designed houses). The house was not completed until after I left Ireland to return to England to be nearer our growing grandchildren, but on a subsequent visit, I caught the house having its final interior decorating being done…

The house I designed at Grange, Co. Sligo, Ireland.

On returning to England in 2007, I had AutoCAD as another string to my bow and did my first professional drafting work at the age of 50! I have worked in an Architectural Metalwork department and as an office junior (albeit the oldest in the firm) in an architectural practice and I use my AutoCAD skills in my current role as a factory manager and also as the designated draughtsman for a mosque which project I have been involved with for the last eight years…

So for most of my career(s) if asked what I do, I have replied “Designer” because that is not only a job I have done in various guises, but I feel it is central to who I am and how I see the world, always looking to see how things work and how to make them work better if possible, and I owe this direction to my father, even though I did not see the road ahead mapped out that way at all, back when I was considering which direction to go in…

A to Z 2025 Challenge – Carol, Cars and Cooking

April 3, 2025April 3, 2025humanist55

Carol

“My sister Carol was a force of Nature!” This is how I began the eulogy to my late sister Carol when she died some 30 months ago. But you didn’t know her and as this is my memoir of sorts, and though I have hundreds of stories about Carol, I seek to write only about what Carol meant to me and the influence she had on my life so this is the merest selection…
An early incident that showed a strong and assertive side of Carol in relation to me, was an iconic image (within our family) – a coloured slide (cheaper in those days than prints) in which Carol is squatting on my plastic football and refusing to give it back. Photographed from above, Carol looks both defiant and cute, as do all children photographed from this angle, with enlarged heads and small bodies. Later, when our sister Helen was born, Carol assumed (or was assigned) the role of “difficult middle child” and with her flaming red hair, she also aligned with the cliché of combative redhead. But mostly we had a loving and mutually supportive relationship – one in which she was not afraid to speak her mind about what she believed best for me.
I recently learned the very appropriate meaning of the name Carol – ‘a joyous song to sing’ from a fellow poet’s piece on names.

Carol trained in Community Arts and was an artist and poet as well as working tirelessly for the cause of refugees, Eritrean and later Syrian, using art to normalise the new lives of children, travelling to international conferences and in latter years, working each Summer with a Youth Club here in Bradford. Sometimes, during the ten years when we both lived in Ireland, I would assist her with face painting at some show or holiday event and the bags of equipment I kept for her when she was here in the Summer are languishing in the corner behind me…

My efforts on the left and Carol’s on the right – taken at Rosses Point with Knocknarea in the background.

Carol (and I) were inveterate collectors, and after her cremation, when it was agreed that I would carry half her ashes back to England to join my parents, her partner and I looked around for something suitable to transport them. This teapot was always my favourite from her teapot collection and now sits, relieved of it’s cargo, on the bookshelf to my left.

As teenagers, when in need of money, I sold various collections of mine to Carol – stamps for one – and she told me that I never stuck with collecting but nevertheless, was happy to purchase them… Carol was like a best friend who you could not bullshit and would always keep you up to the mark!

Another difference between Carol and I and which we shared the progress of when we had video calls, was our approach to shaping Jade trees -Carol (on the Right) preferred a grove of trunks whilst I am shaping mine as a single-trunked tree – I now have custody of both since she died…

My sister Carol – indomitable to the end…

I couldn’t close this brief sketch of Carol and my relationship to her without including her writing since she is in part responsible for my finding myself as a writer also. When Barbara and I lived in Ireland, Carol took me along to a writing group (in person group) and over the years since we would exchange poems and other pieces – here is one of her poems…

Dangerous Dreaming

Be dangerous and dream in this shit hole,
and when you dream,
dream big. Dream radical.
Dream sans frontiers.

Some decry dreamers
as if they were feckless,
ineffective, unworldly.
They underestimate the potential of dreams.

Dreams are powerful.
Dreams are strong.
Dreams are the first step to liberation,
To a new world of possibilities.

Dreams are essential, like breathing.
If you forget to dream, you might as well be dead.
Dreams are a way of staying alive,
even in a shit hole.

Dreams keep you in touch with yourself,
the way you want you to be.
So dream on, especially in a shit hole,
until reality catches up with your dreams.

Dream on, dangerously.

Cars

I have a love/hate relationship with cars! I grew up in an era when the different marques and manufacturers had distinctive styles – unlike today’s offerings where a few owners have grouped companies together, sharing basic substructures and where the cost of developing safety features like crumple zones, has resulted in a dismal similarity across the board. Furthermore, in my lifetime, the consequences of the unfettered growth of private car ownership and consequently, on the growth of cities and the colonisation of the countryside by commuters, the devastation of the planet, has become more than apparent in the form of climate change. You can read an article I wrote with a blueprint for changing our relationship with the car here. Still, I have a love of certain cars – now mostly vintage, for their flair and design…

My Grandfather – Arthur, who died before I was born, with an Austin Seven embellished with a splendid Art Deco lady on it’s bonnet. The Austin Ten was the first family car that my father drove us around in…

I particularly love Citroens, starting with this “Maigret” prewar beauty (photographed on a recent reunion of schoolfriends at The Shuttlewoth Collection where all the aircraft and cars are in fully working condition) but going on to the “goddess” – the Citroen DS – surely the most futuristic car ever to grace the roads. and what about the Citroen Pallas whose dashboard resembles that of the Starship Enterprise…

Another Citroen I would love to own – the iconic 2CV – a car with the largest sunroof, can be wound up to 70mph on the motorway, seats which can take out to be used as deck chairs and all the panels of the car can be changed using just a screwdriver… Photographed in Paris last Summer!

A beautiful two-tone VW Beetle – the old shape which I still prefer – photographed on a visit to Bayeux to see the Tapestry…

Cooking

A Sabatier carbon-steel knife I have used every day for 58 years…

My Mother was traditional in her view of gender roles, she stayed at home and my Dad was the breadwinner – furthermore, she declared that I did not need to learn to cook but my sisters would one day have husbands and so she taught them cooking whilst I merely watched whenever I could and leaned what there was to learn. Out of my sisters and I, only I have cooked professionally! When I left to go to university (a wife not yet in the offing) my parents gave me two recipe books “Cooking in a Bedsitter” by the journalist /writer Katherine Whitehorn, and “The Paupers Cookbook” by Jocasta Innes also a journalist and writer. My ambitions in cooking aspired to more than expediency and economy and so I added “A Book of Mediterranean Food” by the somewhat racy food writer Elizabeth David – a book and writer credited with changing the course of food in postwar England (I didn’t know about the racy bit back then but I am sure it would only have encouraged me to experiment both in the kitchen and beyond…) Books on Chinese and Indian cuisine followed and so I developed a kind of personal fusion style. I wrote more fully on this here as part of the Six Degrees of Separation meme. I will share from that piece, the other gift my parents gave me as I left for university – and if the cookery books were a little banal – the carbon steel Sabbatier boning knife, was decidedly high class and high maintenance! Carbon steel rusts easily and so you must clean and dry it immediately after each use… I have used this knife every day for fifty-eight years, it has seen me through two food businesses and countless meals and feasts…

My essential cookery equipment:- Top row, Airfryer, Pressure Cooker (InstaPot), Frying Pan, middle row – Take-away containers for use in the microwave, Pyrex measuring Jug, old-fashioned Measuring Cone, Microwave Steamer, Wok. Bottom left: knives including an old fashioned cutlery knife for spreading things, can-opener, a wooden spoon that was once symmetrical but has worn down with stirring, spatula, slotted spoon, soup-ladle, silicone spatula, whisk, tongs (my step-daughter converted me to the usefulness of tongs) and a grater.

Other food writing of mine…

A Lifetime Love

All of my 2022 A to Z Challenge which was on the subject of foods that which can be eaten in it’s own right but also used as an ingredient…

Signature Dishes – a Lyric Essay

A Nice Little Soup…

Give us our daily bread..

A to Z 2025 Challenge – Business, Books and Barbara…

April 2, 2025April 2, 2025humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. There is now a term for this type of image – “Knolling” or “Flatlay” and you can find the fascinating origin of this nomenclature here. The memory of this Exhibition (or Exhibit if you are American) has never left me and in addition, the BBC produced a series of programmes (now available as a podcast) A History of the World in 100 Objects, or in book form if you are not able to download from the BBC.

This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

Boredom Box

I have a love of miniature worlds and also of gadgets (more of that under G) and I put this tiny box together to carry in my jacket pocket so that I might never be found at a loose end… It contains a Codewords puzzle, a Sudoku set from a Christmas Cracker, some wool and a miniature crochet hook so that I might practise or demonstrate Tunisian crochet, an IKEA pencil, plus the tools from a cheap Swiss Army card whose cheapness was revealed when the casing broke – consisting of a pen, a nail file, tweezers, a toothpick and a pair of scissors. I have never had to use the boredom box in anger but it is as well to be porepared

Business

I realise that this is not strictly an object apart from the fact that every picture exists as a print, a slide or just a digital collection of 1’s and 0’s… This is the factory where I work 2.5 days a week (semi-retired)… Myself (centre) with some of the staff of the bakery in the factory in Bradford, England. We make Gelato, Puddings and Gateaux for our own Restaurants and also Wholesale. The thing that stood out (pardon the pun) for me in this picture, was how much taller I am ( at 6′ 2″) than my colleagues apart from Adam who is from Sudan – a country noted for tall thin people!

Let me say at the outset – I am not a good businessman – at least when pursuing business on my own account…
You may have gleaned from the A for Art and Architecture, that I had some difficulty deciding what course to pursue in life although I prefer not to think of this as indecision but rather as having too many options to choose from. For many years, if asked what I did, I would say “Designer”, and that covered a lot of activities – Signwriter, Draughtsman, Architectural dabbler and these are all creative roles though within the confines of a brief or practical application. There has also been another quite different string to my bow – working in business, which I came to enjoy – and although I frequently got to employ my design skills in the service of those businesses I worked for or set up, I would say that there has never been a perfect balance between creativity and business skills – except perhaps my restaurant, but that will come under R…

A 1970’s bottle of Liquid Gumption from the time I worked at the factory
producing it. This bottle feature in a website called “Rubbish Walks” which
collects and displays a museum of rubbish…

Actually, the first business I worked in was a factory making Liquid Gumption (cream cleanser), Woodwards Gripe Water, and Wrights Coal Tar Soap and they were made by Sanitas located quite near to where I was living in London at the time. I had just left my first job after University, working for The Greater London Council under “Red” Ken Livingston where I had spent a year as a Trainee Administrator (learned how to write reports) and a year in the Print and Design Section (learned how to produce artwork for print by paste-up) but since these roles had either not suited or proved dead-ends, I needed a job to pay the rent and went to a work agency. After a week digging out huge tanks full of dried silica slurry, and having proved myself as a hard worker, the company took me on to work on Liquid Gumption kitchen and bathroom cream cleanser which was swapping silica(hazardous to the worker’s health) for chalk as the “scouring” agent.

A bottle of Woodwards Gripe Water similar to the one
produced in the 70’s but probably lacking that
alcohol used to extract the ginger flavouring…

The department making this very old soap, had the
worst smell I have ever smelled during the manufacture
– we had to go through this department to reach the canteen and you took a deep breath and tried to make
it through to the other end without taking another…

The factory also made Wrights Coal Tar Soap and Woodwards Gripe Water which in those days, in addition to the active ingredient, Bicarbonate of Soda (to make the babies burp) and Dillseed oil (flavouring and slight anaesthetic), it also contained an extract of Ginger made by steeping dried kibbled (raked apart) ginger in pure alcohol. The finished product thus contained an appreciable amount of alcohol which no doubt helped to soothe the babies but was later deemed a health hazard and removed… We used to obtain sample bottles of the concentrated ginger tincture that had been kept by the lab for sufficient time and dilute them with water and sugar to make ginger wine/liqueur!

The Sanitas factory in Brockwell, also housed some regional offices of the company and from the factory floor you could see people moving around behind frosted glass that delivered “borrowed” light into the factory and yet we had nothing to do with those office workers. The only individual who moved between the world of management and the shopfloor was the Factory Manager, whose name I have long forgotten, but who wore a white coat – little did I think that I would one day also wear a white coat and occupy that very same role… It says something about the industrial relations of the 1970’s that such stratification existed and I like to think that it is a little better today…

The next business I worked for was called The Good Food Shop and was in Lamb’s Conduit Street in London and was run by one, Tony Page who sadly I have lost touch with. It was here that I blagged my way into cooking at weekends to take a little pressure off the chef. I was a reasonable though enthusiastic cook but here I learned to make 6 buckets of salad each morning, six quiches, ratatouille, chilli-con-carne, beef-in-beer, and other staple dishes of the time which stood me in good stead when I eventually opened my own restaurant. I later went to work full-time for Tony when he acquired the shop next door and wanted to open a Wholefood Shop about which I knew a little more than him. After The Good Food Shop closed due to losing half it’s lunchtime trade when the newspaper industry moved from Fleet Street to Wapping, I worked in several businesses with Tony. I will forever be indebted to Tony for introducing me to the spreadsheet which in those pre-PC days, he produced on graph paper, in pencil with lots of rubbing out. Excel spreadsheets form a large part of my work today – chiefly monitoring prices and profitability of products in the factory where I work.

What I am forced to admit, is that whilst I have not succeeded in my own businesses, I have been “a useful engine” in other people’s businesses (more of that later). Creativity exercises one part of my brain and business skills another – I have never found a position or activity in which the balance is quite right…

Books

Unlike my partner Barbara, who grew up with no books in the house, I have always been surrounded by books, my father’s collection of post-war economy cover Penguins and Pelicans sat outside his bedroom door in their now iconic orange (fiction), azure (non-fiction) with other colours for biography and crime. My parents bought the complete Encyclopedia Britannica which was for us what the internet is today. Other bookshops contained all of Dickens unabridged, wrist-wearying hardbacks – and then there was the local library. At four books each a week, my youngest sister, Helen, would choose the Enid Blyton books she had not yet read and immediately begin reading in the corner of the library, carry on in the car going home and by tea-time she was finished the first of her four picks – the result – she became a speed-reader which was confirmed when her school in Australia (more of that later) tested all the pupils to determine their reading level.

This bookcase, the one beside the desk where I am writing from, represents about two-ninths of the books in the house. These particular ones contain reference books, but also poetry, plays, design, art, music to play and some novels. Elsewhere there are cookery books, therapy and a lot more novels and at least a third of all the shelves are double stacked…

I read once, that everyone, by the time they become an adult, has picked a character from a book they’ve read, on which to model themselves. I wonder if that means that in an age where children read fewer books, characters from film and tv are now role models – Elon Musk certainly seems to have imagined himself as some kind of super-hero though sadly appears to have become a super-villain… After reading this theory, I searched my soul for clues as to who I might have picked and came to the conclusion that it might have been “Doc” in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. He was a real-life Marine Biologist who lived in Cannery Row and as well as being a close friend of Steinbeck, Doc seems to have been able to mix with everyone in Cannery Row from the “bums” in the Palace Flophouse to the girls in the whorehouse (though he was not a client). Doc was known to entertain “high-class dames” when he would fire up classical music on his gramophone. Doc and Steinbeck wrote up a marine biology expedition which Doc invited Steinbeck along on and the result was The Log from the Sea of Cortez. My mother was proud to say that she raised us to be able to speak with anyone from a tramp to the queen so it is perhaps not surprising that I should have identified with and modelled myself on such an egalitarian and kind polymath…

I am addicted to books and goodness knows what my children will do with them all if we are not forced to downsize before departing this mortal coil – then all the special books that have associations none but I or Barbara know, will stand on a level playing field and if they are not chosen to be kept, will suffer the indignity of the market place or worse – the charity shop – perhaps I need to think about that…

Barbara

I am not going to say too much about my partner and love of my life Barbara, partly for her privacy and because this is not her story but there were many times when I counted on her support just as she receives from me. We have been together, with a couple of brief hiatus’ for 42+ years. The picture above featured in a poetry post I made called One Day which will tell you all you need to know…

A to Z 2025 Challenge – Art and Architecture

April 1, 2025April 1, 2025humanist55

I confess I am not a great fan of autobiographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace. It just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. There is now a term for this type of image – “Knolling” or “Flatlay” and you can find the fascinating origin of this nomenclature here. The memory of this Exhibition (or Exhibit if you are American) has never left me and in addition, the BBC produced a series of programmes (now available as a podcast) A History of the World in 100 Objects, or in book form if you are not able to download from the BBC.
This more thematic approach appeals more and although I am not arranging the objects which I have chosen to tell my story in chronological order, I hope that my writing will be sufficiently interesting to keep your interest Dear Reader, and that on the journey from A to Z, you will assemble an impression of my life and who I am…

Brushes +, Top left, a handy brush roll, once my mother’s; top right, plastic palettes, and below them a selection of palette knives and a glass container for water; bottom left, large brushes for watercolour, centre my watercolour brushes and to their right, sponge brushes for large-scale calligraphy and bottom right, one of many sketchbooks – this particular one is paper made from elephant dung which has proved to be quite absorbent making it good for quick outdoor sketches.
Not all the pictures in this A to Z will be “knolling style” and I am not sure whether the original Parker Knoll technician who invented the form would find this example nearly neat enough…

If a Writer is a person who writes then I may consider myself to be a writer but if the same stricture were applied to being an Artist, then I could not claim that title, at least not on a regular basis. Of course, writing is an art form, but there was a time when I did seriously consider the possibility of becoming a “Fine Artist” and for that matter, I briefly considered studying to be an Architect. I decided against being a painter because I saw even at 16, how the art world works – you find a gallery that likes your work and they promote you until you want to do something different in style and then they say “No! Do more of what sells!!!” (Unless you achieve the stature of say, David Hockney and then you can do whatever the hell you like!) So you must submit or starve in a garret… A slight simplification, but enough to put me off going down that road. As for Architecture, I took out a book from the library whose first chapter simply said “So you want to become an Architect?” and the next chapter, with even greater brevity, said, “Don’t!” It then went on to outline the seven-year process of qualifying as an Architect before you really enter the workforce and have to find your own path. The same logic caused me to reject joining the Royal Air Force at 16 because even though paying your way through University and attaining a pilot licence were tempting, there was no guarantee that you would be fit to become a fighter pilot at 21 and who knows what else you might end up doing – perhaps not even flying at all – uh-uh!

A box of fish photographed (much to my partner’s puzzlement) on Naxos and painted some years later in Ireland.

This multimedia piece was made in the studio I set up for both signwriting and art when I first moved to Sligo in 1995.

But having spent the first paragraph of a sort of memoir saying what I didn’t choose to do, I did continue to be an artist on and off and I have worked in Architecture to an extent, and so this first post of the 2025 A to Z Challenge celebrates these two areas of endeavour by me. How did I even get into Art? Well in 1968, my father took a sabbatical year from his post as a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at Oxford and spent two terms as an exchange lecturer at the University of New South Wales. In 1968 it was cheaper for a family of five, plus my Granny, to go by ship than to fly to Australia, and so we had a world cruise thrown in. Four weeks around the Cape of Good Hope, because the Suez Canal was closed due to the Six-Day War, then six weeks across the Pacific and via the Panama Canal back to England. Needless to say, this was a mind-expanding experience for a fourteen-year-old on many levels, but one thing that happened had far-reaching consequences. We disembarked the ship in Perth, Western Australia and spent two weeks with some relations on a farm near Bunbury. Growing there we encountered Paper-bark Gum Trees that like all gum trees, shed their leaves continuously all year round and so are in effect, evergreen but they also shed their bark and as the name implies, the Paper-bark comes away in wads of multi-layered tissue-thin, varicoloured bark ranging from red, through browns to white and even black if bush fires have blown past the tree. Later in Sydney, we visited a gallery where some artist had collaged paper-bark along with oil-painted sky and lake. My mother criticised this combination and felt hat with the palette offered by the paperbark, oil paint was unnecessary. My father challenged her and said that if that was the case then she should demonstrate it for herself. So our relatives in Bunbury duly sent a parcel of bark and together with dried seeds, leaves, moss and suchlike, she collaged landscapes which were well received back in Oxford. She next set about organising weekend exhibitions on the University Park railings and for several summers we children had to spend every weekend sitting at the exhibition. Eventually, I decided to have a go myself and produced and even sold a few there. You could saunter up behind people and earwig on their comments and I came to learn a universal truth about art – Even if You the Artist Do Not Like a Piece – There May Be Someone Out There Who Thinks It’s the Bees’s Knees!

One of my mother’s Australian Paper-bark collage pictures.

Later, I found it necessary to stay on an extra year at school and not having a full timetable, decided to add Art and Geology to the Geography A-Level I was re-taking. Yet still I had only 11 hours of timetabled lessons and so I was allowed out of school to visit some of the great museums and art galleries of Oxford. I discovered the Print Room of the Ashmolean Museum (a kind of mini British Museum) and if they weren’t too busy, the staff would sit me down with – wait for it – boxes of Turner watercolours (5) or a box of Thomas Girtin’s work (a friend of Turner). I doubt whether they would allow such things today, but these boxes of old masters’ work had a direct influence on my own efforts for which I am eternally grateful and I can still visualise the luminous paintings of Venice by Turner, to this day… However, for the reasons already given, I decided not to pursue Fine Art and yet I have, from time to time, got my paints, or other mediums out ,and made an artworl or two, so here are some of those pieces…

A street in Valetta, Malta – watercolour 1980.

A screen print based on a tiny photograph in a national newspaper of the annual Thames Barge and Smack Race – a wonderful punning name that conveys the jostling that can characterise a sailing race. I have used the overlapping transparent layers to try and convey how the skipper of a boat in a race must focus on everything from the adjacent boat to what is going on in the distance…

This was a wedding present to my late sister and her husband and is a base relief carved in 22mm MDF from a drawing by Eric Gill, artist and
the typographer who gave us Gill Sans and Gill Transport (London Underground).

The Haiku at the bottom of this piece is the source of the title of this blog – multimedia 1995

A work in progress after a holiday in Morocco, the largest canvas I’ve tried at about 5.5 feet 4.3 feet, Acrylic.

And what of Architecture? I had studied Technical Drawing at school and I occasionally produced some illustrations for my father’s work and although I was heavily influenced him in many ways, I was not strong enough at maths to follow him into engineering and despite his disdain for architects generally, he admired Frank Lloyd Wright who made his students go out into the desert and build their own buildings. And so, briefly, I considered Architecture until I read “that book” Instead, I eventually worked as a jobbing signwriter for many years – an applied art, where you get to develop your own style and inject a modicum of creativity into every job – more of that in later posts. However, in a life-changing moment, I broke my hip in a car crash, spent a year on crutches and could no longer work up ladders so a change of direction beckoned. A friend of mine in Ireland, where I was living at the time, got me a job part-time, teaching Modelmaking to Interior Architecture students in the Engineering Department of Sligo Technical College (now a university I believe). Nothing fancy like finished building models but rather, how to think in 3D – so lots of cereal packets and Sellotape! Whilst doing this, I had the chance to first learn, and then teach AutoCad which is the computer version of the Technical Drawing I had learnt at school. Eventually, we moved back to England to see more of our growing grandchildren and AutoCad enabled me to get a job as a professional draughtsman starting at the ripe old age of 50! A few years later I worked in an architect’s office for a year or so – the oldest one there and yet the office junior. Along the way, I designed a house in Ireland which got built and designed the converted stables which is now our house and I have been the draughtsman for a Mosque in Bradford for the last eight years (mosque building is an incremental affair as funds are raised).

A house that one of my AutoCAD evening class students asked me to design for a lovely site he had bought. He subsequently sold the site and the design (which I had got through planning) to somebody else, who dropped some of the features and built it. This is a common story for architects, the clients making changes – anyway, I visited the house when the outside was complete and they were just finishing decorating inside – so that’s another one off the bucket list – a house designed and built…

Our house before and after – a “stable-conversion” which had been used as a workshop fo decades and which I redesigned as a house….

So despite the non-choices I made when contemplating what to do with my life, I have, amongst many other things, worked in an Engineering Department like my father, painted a body of pictures and dabbled in Architecture after all…

A to Z 2025 – Theme Reveal

March 9, 2025March 9, 2025humanist55

My Story in 26(ish) Objects…

I confess I am not a great fan of auto-biographies that begin at the beginning and follow a temporal path up to the present day – not that the person might not have some interesting stories, facts and opinions strung on their necklace but it just doesn’t appeal as a structure. On the other hand, in my last, extra year at school in Oxford, retaking an A-level and adding a couple more, I was allowed out of school on my recognisance and saw a fascinating Exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery. The Artist had laid out and photographed every single possession of a single person – for example, all the cutlery was laid out in one shot, all the shoes in another. There is now a term for this type of image – “Knolling” or “Flatlay” and you can find the fascinating origin of this nomenclature here. The memory of this Exhibition (or Exhibit if you are American) has never left me and in addition, the BBC produced a series of programmes (now available as a podcast) A History of the World in 100 Objects, or in book form if you are not able to download from the BBC.

Just to give you a little taste of what is to come, the photo below, which is in Knolling style (though not all will be – this A to Z is a sort of metaphorical Knolling) shows the contents of the briefcase I take to work with me on my semi-retired 2.5 days a week…

Top row (left to right) Laptop, Wireless Mouse, Charging Cable, Pocket Book for Analogue Notes, Pens and Highlighter, various papers and copies of my chapbook.
Middle Row, Diabetic Testing Kit, Hairbrush, Folding Toothbrush, Lip balm, Mouthwash, Dry Mouth Spray, Laser Measuring tool and case, Earbud set, Electronics Case
Third Row, Wireless Phone Charger, Plug-in Phone Charger, Superman Power-pack, Various Electronic Cables
Bottom Row, Briefcase, Masks (left over from Covid), Scale Ruler, Folding Shopping Bag, Ibuprofen, Reading Glasses, USB sticks
Lower Right, Multi-tool Pen-knife.

What’s In a Name

March 7, 2025March 7, 2025humanist55

Andrew means “manly” I can live with that though I once had a yen to be Martin
Briefly

My family name is Wilson – Son of William – whoever he was in the mists of history
Unknown

My recently widowed Grandmother demanded I be commemoratively named Arthur
Unwise

Andrew Arthur doesn’t sing right so my rebel parents named me Andrew Frewin
Defied

Frewin – Anglo-Saxon “Frea-ing” – Friend of the Ruler!
No way…

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to write the poetry of names using a
WaltMarie poetry style…

10 lines
Even lines are just 2 syllables
Odd lines are longer but without syllable restriction
The even lines make their own mini-poem if read separately
The meter and rhyme are unspecified

And the theme of your poem should be

The history/meaning of your name
or one you wish you had
or an imaginary one

I was born in the gatehouse of Frewin Hall, Oxford which is part of Brasenose College of which my father was then a don. In return for this subsidised college house, part of his duties was to lock the gates at 9pm each night as the students were curfewed in those days – imagine! My Grandfather on my Father’s side died during my Mother’s pregnancy with me and this poem tells the result of the conflict between my domineering Grandmother and my parents…
There is a Frewin family who presumably built Frewin Hall but as far as I know, I am the only person to have Frewin as a middle name, so if you have ever wondered about my “handle” Frewin55, now you know. (I was born 8th March 1955.)