with Betty and Ziggy at Emma's graduation

The essential facts:

Time and place of birth:

Plaistow Nursing Home, London E.13., Sunday 16th December, 1934 (conveyed hence courtesy of a passing milk float).

Reproductive history:

Twice married, interspersed with three live-ins. Four children. Son deceased, three daughters surviving.

England, small isolated cottage with large garden, nine miles from Cambridge.

East Ham Grammar School, London. Left prematurely without taking final exams owing to single-parent poverty, etc.. After retirement, took BA Hons in English Lit. and Philosophy at A.P.U., Cambridge.

The typical frustrated mediocre artist syndrome. With education blighted, and no hope of varied artistic interests ever being able to support me, flitted between various unfulfilling occupations for many years. (I'd call them no more than that). At forty I easily qualified as a paradigm of fecklessness. It would be ludicrous to list them all. The following will give the flavour:

Junior clerk in the City, bell boy and public room steward in the merchant navy, National Serviceman (trained as a secretary so, glad to say, never fired a shot in anger), London fireman, insurance agent, bank clerk, barman, builder's labourer, oil-line pipe fitter, scaffolder's mate, direct salesman, sales manager, tally-clerk in London docks, insurance agent, insurance superintendent, croupier in West End club, cab-driver, distribution manager, and so on, and etcetera... until...

I finally recognised that I was probably too arrogant and cynical to remain safely within the employed class (I was fast approaching the stage when no sane employer would want me)! After a spell at organising the distribution of the early editions of Miss London (a free sheet), offers from other publishers gave me the opportunity to adopt the entrepreneurial life. Thereafter I enjoyed a certain amount of financial success - far greater incomes than I'd ever known as an employee. However, my distribution business folded after some years when all my free-sheet contracts folded one by one due to the 1973 oil crisis and the ensuing mini depression. After a spell in insurance again, I eventually set up my own office as a life, pensions and investment broker in Newmarkets. I enjoyed four very successful years until, in March 1988, a certain Chancellor of the Exchequer almost bankrupted half the nation by giving his famous advance warning of his intention to abolish joint tax relief on mortagages for unmarried couples within the next four months. Due to the consequent rush of unmarried couples to 'buy now while stocks last', this Double MIRAS' budget (as it became known) soon led to the period when house prices doubled over twelve months, only to fall - for the first time in living memory - to two thirds their previous value. Within three years, half the homeowners in Britain - including myself - found themselves in negative equity. Like many of my clients, I struggled for three years to survive without making a penny profit. Eventually, in 1993, I was glad to hand over what was left to a firm of accountants to avoid bankruptcy and, not so gladly, the (now heavily mortgaged) family home to the bank.

Since then, thanks to my stoic wife's unstinting support as a teacher, I've done little but indulge myself doing the things I love best, and have never been happier. But somehow, I still can't bring myself to thank Nigel Lawson for my present state of bliss.

Miscellaneous Interests:

Warm beer and red wine; dining at home with friends; convivial conversation and good argument, along with a dry pipe; creative writing; playing guitar and piano; painting; current affairs; sailing; swimming; all forms of art; theatre; classical concerts; archaeology, anthropology; Greek and Roman art, philosophy and literature, mythology, European art and history; the cosmos; general philosphy, especially ethics; (in fact, all things to do with 'the human condition'); evolutionary psychology; anything to do with advances in human biology, especially in regard to the possibility of biological regression - which is to say, the prevention of further hair loss and the possibility of libidinal regeneration.

Beethoven, Beethoven, Beet…, Vivaldi, Bach, Palestrina, Mozart, etc., Wagner (some), Mahler (some), etc., plus traditional Jazz, Blues, Swing, and British folk music, especially Irish.

For me it's the French Impressionists, followed by fine watercolourists, otherwise artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Valasquez, the Dutch School, etc.. From which you will gather I'm no great fan of abstract art. In sculpture and architecture, I also mostly prefer classical to abstract. All very conservative, I know.

Dead Poets and Playwrights I've enjoyed:

Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripedes, Homer, Ovid, Horace, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, (the greatest of all time), Ben Jonson, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, some Milton, some Pope, the Romantics: Goethe, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats; the Brownings, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Ibsen, Chekov, Thomas Hardy, W.B.Yates, Charlotte Mew, Edna St Vincent Millay, T.S Eliot, Frank O'Connor, W.H.Auden, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, (if only for `Under Milk Wood' and Fern Hill), some Masefield, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath ...

Can't say I read much fiction these days unless I'm really stuck. I've always been a prodigious reader, both fiction and non-ficiton, but one's tastes do change over the years, and nowadays I prefer non-fiction. However, I admire, and have enjoyed, some Austen, Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, Anthony Trollope, Montpassant, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Andre Gide, James Joyce (if only for Ulysses and The Dubliners), most of Virginia Woolf, all of Albert Camus, some Sartre, most Dostoevsky, some Tolstoy, D.H.Lawrence, Daphne du Maurier, Zora Neale Hurston, Iris Murdoch, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Lawrence Durrell, etc..

Hmm, still under consideration, I think. I can't help wondering who the icons of this age will turn out to be in a hundred years from now. If I knew, I'd read them, of course!

Some thinkers and philosophers who've made a difference to the way I think:

Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, Epictetus, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Jesus of Nazareth, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Goethe, Kirkegaard, Bentham, J.S.Mill, William James, Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, Camille Paglia, Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Michael Dawson... The result of all this? I'm a fully paid up member of the British Humanist Association, and strongly support all secularist aims. I would be happy to campaign for all religions to be marginalised, and disassociated from the political process.

Organised religion especially, otherwise, apart from all the usual things like bad manners, discourtesy, hypocrisy, bigotry, parsimony and violence, etc., it's mostly minor things like other people's music in public, (in fact, all unnecessary noise), or people who flaunt their already conspicuous wealth. I could also add irrational sexual inhibition and repression. And I'm an awful culture snob too, tending to lose interest in those I discover to be ignorant, or apathetic, about human origins and our path to the present day, 'the meaning of life', etc..

Love, but, if pressed, then warm crusty bread spread thick with salt butter.

Favourite Quote:

'I have spread my dreams before the crowd; tread lightly for you tread upon my dreams.' (W. B.Yates).

My current chosen epitaph:

It's just new experiences all the time; all the time new experiences...

sonoflawrence@yahoo.co.uk

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