raddy

Born Manchester 1946 attended North M/cr Grammar, my redemption and passport to a better life.Graduated London University, French and English then PGCE in Nottingham.Taught in Slough (no friendly bombs but copious amounts of Mars Bars from pupils) Left Harrow Weald where juggernauts rumbled through our dreams with my rapidly rounding wife to be, pregnant with our daughter. We settled in the welcoming city of Sheffield, steel on the outside but with a Northern soft centre at its heart. That was 1972: my hair was long and unruly like our hope. We stayed with parents of a lifelong friend, eccentric genteel people who, without tv, lapped up ours, Olypic events, period dramas like someone discovering some new opiate, making a necessity out of addiction. We moved that Autumn, learning to live on a hill and with the birth of our baby, I stopped smoking, started jogging and returned to teaching having left it previously to programme computers for J Sainsbury, whose best feature was the origanal art in the staff canteen: lunch with Brigit Riley on the wall...psychedelic man!! Eventually, I took a special needs diploma and taught Autistic infants until retiring in 2003 to move to Spain in 2006 where we restored an old house. The past and present merged in my first attempt at Blogs writing about running through the village to the Pico Ágila one morning, then reflecting upon memories contained in the old house set against the bloody backloth of a war symbolised by the trenches slashed into the hillside just outside the village