Lockdown

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

Business

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…

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.

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.

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…

© Andrew Wilson, 2025