What was and what is .......from Peckham to Eltham and on to Manchester

Now when you have passed 70 you are allowed the occasional self indulgent story.

After all with fewer years ahead than behind I do find myself checking off life’s achievements.

I still can’t make a bed to pass muster, and increasingly I am learning a whole new range of dishes from each of my sons while on a good day I think I am just a bit smarter than my smart phone.

Setting these milestones of experience to one side it is right that every so often you review what you have done.

In my case this was prompted by the wish to reaffirm that the latest book should carry both my name and that of the archivist who has helped with the research.

Originally this had been the plan but somewhere along the path the publishers or the organization had forgotten, and so while the name of Liz the archivist is not on the front cover she is credited in the book,  because I have always made sure that others get due credit and also because I have nothing left to prove.

In the last eight years I have carved out a new career, writing ten books, seven of which have been part of a very successful collaboration with the Manchester artist Peter Topping, and watched as the blog I started in November 2011, clocked nearly six million readers.

Added to which, all our four sons are launched on their careers and are happy, and that counts for a lot.
But reflecting for a moment on those books, I wonder what the ten year old me would have thought.

My early school years were characterized by lack lustre progress where much of the work was baffling and challenging and crowned by the comment of my last Junior school teacher that I “was not academically minded”.

It was a judgement that incensed my mother and burned deep, but which I shrugged off as just how I was.

Years later as two of my sons were found to have dyslexia and received excellent support I wonder about me.

Not that this is one of those sob stories but more a reflection of what all of us can do which may come late in life but arrives.

In the last decade I have come across some amazing artists, photographers and writers, who only got started after the children had grown up or had retired.  The interest and the skill were always there but the daily grind of earning a living, looking after the kids along with all the “other stuff” got in the way.

For many of them, that much derided social media has offered a platform for their work, which publishers seldom touch and galleries have no time for.

Thinking back to my years at Edmund Waller and Samuel Pepys I know that there were many who will have flowered, and equally during the three years at Crown Woods in Eltham I saw that latent talent emerge.

But for me and I suspect others it was a long time coming.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson