I have a faint but satisfactory memory from primary school involving plasticine. It seems that I had made some major work, horses in a field, cows maybe. The field was contrived by building a wall of plasticine around the edge of the plasticine board. I now realise that the board had started out as a slate for writing on with a slate pencil. These things were going out of use when I started school. I was instructed to carry my chef d’oeuvre into the other classrooms for the other children to admire. It must have been a very affirmative thing for me. ....................

I suppose art was always my thing. At the age of nine or ten, before I passed my eleven plus exam anyway, I made a series of pencil drawings whilst sitting at the back of the class* depicting some buckskin clad hero fighting Indians or brawling in saloon bars. He wore a fringed jacket, I recall. I had developed a taste for rudimentary Mantegna style foreshortening, which I guess I must have picked up from comics. I can still remember details from these drawings that I did sixty years ago. These drawings were objects of desire for classmates, I think..............

I guess there are branches of Lidl all over Europe, the world, who knows, and all pretty similar, I imagine.  In and around Kalamata there are three. Some years ago, Herbert watched a guy with a machine cutting the big expanse of grass around one of these supermarkets. He went in to ask if he could take the cut grass for his sheep ...............

Herbert is our nearest neighbour. He has three olive terraces a few hundred metres down the track from our land. He has lived there for almost twenty years. For the first few years he lived on the site in a caravan until he got round to building something more substantial. What he built was a single story Tyrolean chalet with deep eaves, whose white walls I later adorned with the kind of painted baroque curlicues and floral swags favoured in his native village in Tyrol..................

Once the structure reached the first floor, it became obvious that we were in need of some kind of hoist to get material up from ground level. On the building sites in the district, of which there were many a few years ago, I saw different kinds of elevators and lifts in use, but the most common type of lifting gear was the geranaki, a small crane powered by a petrol engine, chiefly used for lifting wheelbarrow loads of mixed concrete or wheelbarrow loads of bricks or concrete blocks.................

Now you might imagine when you look at the big structure, that the ceramic tiles which cover most of its external surfaces, were part of some plan. Not so. We had been constructing the thing from cast concrete and cement blocks for some time before tiles made an appearance.   The dead cement greys gave it the air of a nuclear bunker or a Soviet railway station. I quite liked it..............

Quite recently I spent some months working on a very large piece of sculpture, a standing figure. (a woman, obviously).  My first thought was that I would make it from strips of steel, welded together. It was a little over three metres high, almost twice life sized, so it soon became quite heavy as I welded one strip to another. With the help of a family of couch surfers who were staying at the time, we wrestled it up on to the concrete plinth I had made for it beside the track about fifty metres from the house, so that I could finish it in situ.................

Much more recently, a piece of my sculpture was destroyed in an earthquake. Well, an earth tremor. It was a biggish object, a somewhat larger than life sized torso. I made a plaster mould from a clay original and then cast it in white cement, so it was quite a substantial chunk of stuff, and heavy...............

I have painted easel pictures for a long time, more than fifty years I suppose, though my output has varied year to year. When I was younger, in my twenties, I took it quite seriously and exhibited stuff at the annual open exhibition at the city gallery in Hull, the Ferens Gallery. At the time we lived in Holderness, the level plain which stretches eastward from Hull to the sea. ................