Category: Personal Reflections
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To look at my family tree is to see a map of a London that has largely slipped away. In the 1960s and 70s, we weren’t just living near the City; we were the very people who kept its historic heart beating. From the markets to the livery halls, every member of the family practiced…
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For forty years, a recurring dream visited my sleep with the regularity of a heartbeat. It was a strange, fragmented vision: a single flower resting on a conveyor belt—a small, fragile piece of beauty moving through a mechanical world. Then, a sudden, deafening bang would shatter the air. In the darkness that followed, I would…
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For many who grew up in London during the 1970s, the Cold War was far more than a distant headline; it was a physical presence, often perched high above our heads. For those of us who spent our formative years at Moreland Street School on Goswell Road, that presence took a very specific and distinctive…
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There are fragments of our childhood that, decades later, shine with undiminished clarity. For me, many of those luminous memories are bound up with the school trips that took us, term after term, to the hallowed halls of Sadler’s Wells Theatre. We were barely out of single digits, under 10 years of age, wide-eyed and…
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In the autumn of 1977, London was a city of stark contrasts. I was a young boy just starting his first term at Sir Philip Magnus School, the world felt like it was expanding. The transition from primary school to the imposing corridors of secondary school was a rite of passage, marked by the rush…
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In the wake of the ‘No Kings’ sentiment that surged through the United States in 2025, one is forced to ask a pragmatic question: Does the presence of a powerless, hereditary monarch actually serve as a vital safeguard for the common citizen? To the modern eye, the Crown appears an anachronism; yet, to the student…