Okay...but here’s a bit of mine anyway: After school (Bedales - posh, “progressive,” co-educational: good, actually), went to a place known as “The London School of Film Technique,” later to be the London International Film School. This was on Brixton’s Electric Avenue in the early 60’s. Housed in a cramped building full of rickety winding staircases and dark pokey rooms, like a German Expressionist film set: we would wander out into the Avenue’s market to get coffee and bacon rolls, to the sounds of ska and bluebeat, being squawked at by parrots on the stalls, and joshed by the West Indian stallholders...there was virtually no equipment save a couple of wind-up Bolex 16mm cameras and a French “Cameflex” dual gauge 16/35mm camera that kept on jamming during a take. But the tutors and visiting lecturers made up for it with incredible dedication and optimism. We all dreamed of making films like Godard, Truffaut and Fellini (including the tutors) Then: down to earth with a bump. Wrote to all the film companies and studios - same answer: we can’t hire you without a union card. Contacted ACTT: we can’t allow you to join unless you’re already working for a recognised company. With hindsight, if I’d stuck to it I’d probably have bumped into Ken Russell or Lindsay Anderson or somebody in Soho and wangled a job as a runner...but I was impatient, and there were many distractions, this being London and the 60’s after all. Apart from all the jokes (if you can remember the 60’s, then you weren’t there, etc.), there was a creative explosion going on at the time... I shared flats for a while with Australian painter Vernon Treweeke, now the revered “father” of Aussie psychedelic art - and we caught the first gigs of Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, amongst others...Vernon passed on to me his job as a dresser at the Royal Court Theatre where they were doing new plays by the likes of Edward Bond and John Arden...there was The Roundhouse, The UFO Club, the “Dialectics of Liberation” conference at the Albert Hall with Allen Ginsberg, Jim Haines’ Arts Lab, Alex Trocchi, Davy Graham...and there was always the music, everywhere. Then there was a spell of being the “roadie” for Pete Brown’s cult band Piblokto, whose members seemed to consist of anyone of Pete’s mates that could make the gig that night - but they were, variously: John McLoughlin, Jim Mullen, Jack Bruce, Danny Thompson, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Graham Bond, and so on...Pete went on to co-write with Jack Bruce many of Cream’s great songs. For me, things changed at the 1968 Anti-Vietnam demo in Grosvenor Square. There, I witnessed an ordinary London copper, without his helmet, and suddenly isolated from his unit, surrounded by us: a howling mob, shouting “kill the pig!” I hadn’t seen real, naked fear before...but then, as if by common consent, a little pathway was made for him through the bodies, and he scuttled through it back to his mates. And America didn’t pull out of Vietnam for another six years... And I still hadn’t got round to working in film or TV. One year later, and I’m sitting with my Scottish girlfriend in Willie the shepherd’s bothy tucked under the slopes of Ben Lomond, on a warm summer’s night, eating salmon (with mashed potatoes!) that Willie had poached* from the local burn, watching the Apollo moon landing with him and his family: “One small step for [a] man...” etc. (*go down at midnight when they’re running up the burn, put an old woollen sock on your arm up to the elbow; with a torch in your other hand, shine it on the water to dazzle them as they hang in the current. Slip your hand gently under the tail of one, take a sudden grip and - whoosh, he’s flapping about on the bank.) Well, of course, I stayed , and still do, in Scotland. And somehow, just by bumping into people at the right moment, started getting into what was then a fledgling independent film scene in Scotland, first, as a boom operator, then as a camera assistant, and finally editing, which was what I really wanted to do all along - I wanted to see what happened to all those miles of footage we were shooting, how it got made into a film or a TV programme. So, 30 years later, here we are. I don’t think editing can be taught, but it can be learned, and that’s what I’m still doing. But if I were trying to teach it, maybe I’d say: look at the material, absorb it, look at it again - and then go for a walk and a think. Some of my best editing has got done sitting on my patio in the garden...