Do our characters ever change? Or am I still the same timid red-haired schoolboy who was always being picked up by his teacher for his untidy writing and getting ‘all hot and bothered’? Going back the nature versus nurture idea, I have concluded that yes, our characters do change over time and this is dependent […]
By the time I was cleared to drive and ride my bike again in early April 2017, I was feeling fine in myself with just some slight tension in my chest if I did things like light gardening. In January, before I had a date for my operation, I had cancelled my intended cycling holiday […]
I believe that our characters are supremely complex. As previously considered, I think that our personalities develop through a combination of genes and environment, but now I want to explore whether the context of environment may have had the greater influence on me. Who we meet, where and under what circumstances must shape our thinking […]
In the weeks before the operation in February 2017, I was very cheerful. I had finally begun to accept that things at work would need to change, and with many people reassuring me that I still had an important role to play, I started to believe it. In January and February, Geraldine and I had […]
My primary school, St Chad’s, South Hill in Whittle-le-Woods was tiny. There were about 60 or 70 pupils when I was there, and just eight in my year group in the final year. The pupils were a cross section of society, although all the pupils were Catholic. Contrary to what you might expect, I didn’t […]
In December 2016, having agreed to attend counselling sessions and continuing to work from home, I gradually began to accept the idea that my life was necessarily going to change, and my mood gradually improved as the year end approached. I enjoyed a quiet Christmas and New Year which felt very normal. The thought of […]
I don’t think I ever knew nor understood how my parents became who they were. I only remember their lives from the mid-1960s and when I try to imagine their own upbringing as children and young adults, I am at a complete loss. I can only go off half-remembered stories that they would occasionally tell […]
In the weeks following my heart attack in 2016, initially everything was good. I was happy to have experienced what I considered a near miss, in the sense that things could have been so much worse. Before the illness in late September I had no idea that I was in any danger, and so I […]
My Dad was a lovely, peaceful man. He survived three World Wars (two hot, one cold) but fought in none. He was deemed too young for the Great War (it started 2½ weeks before he was born and finished when he was only four) and his eyesight was too poor for him to sign up […]
In an earlier autobiography, ‘By Such Things we are Formed’, I gave an account of my life up to November 2016, just after my heart attack, but before the operation to rectify the problem with the plumbing around my heart. Since then, my life underwent several significant changes until about two years ago when it […]