Work in progress
Previous | Contents | Next James (Sonny) After Angus was demobilised he went to work for Sonny, and to begin with business was good. “Heather was just born and things were going well,” Angus writes, “when for some reason Sonny decided to sell up and buy another place in the Balham markets”. This ... Read more
Previous | Contents | Next Wartime service Angus’s first job was in a drawing office with a heating and ventilation engineer in Kingsway, London, but after some eighteen months he decided to join the Royal Air Force. “This was accomplished by buying six months extra National Health Stamps to falsely increase my ... Read more
Previous | Contents | Next Heather was bringing in most of the family’s income, which I’ve already admitted wasn’t great for the male psyche — and one reason why I look back to what I was doing then with mixed feelings. Excitement at what we tried to do, guilt for walking away from it. Amazement ... Read more
Previous | Contents | If you landed here from the outside world, understand that this page Is part of a bigger, personal project. I’ve tried to keep my personal engagement with Brian Donovan in the 1970s to a separate page, where you’ll find more about him and his work. Another article relates ... Read more
Previous | Contents | Next § Brian Donovan was our guru when we started building our brigantine at Span Farm, but ferrocement was one of those collaborative 1970s subcultures, centred around designers like him and Richard Hartley, a few industry figures and the New Zealand Ferro Cement Marine Association Inc. ... Read more
I’ve decided that in future I’ll highlight the latest pages here, but having written a few months ago about my strange adolescence — why the wheels fell off a bright kid, what it took to get me on the road again, and why Heather and I headed off in rather unexpected ... Read more
Previous | Detour | Next This detour is therapy more than anything else. Picture me on the therapist’s couch talking about 1964-66 in detail instead of skipping over it. If you really want to watch my wheels fall off in slow motion, help yourself — some people enjoy observing lab mice! Otherwise I’d ... Read more
Previous | Detour | Next Aimless I may have thought I was on the way up after my stint at the hospital, the magic Summer of ’65 and reverting to my original goal, a degree in agriculture, but I was wrong. After only three days I wanted to leave Massey. Like the previous ... Read more
Previous | Detour | Next I thought it might be amusing to record an old man (“older man”!) reading his nineteen year-old’s words aloud — the diary I wrote over the Summer of 1965. Honestly, I was amazed — by how much we did, most of it forgotten. By our youthful exuberance and the ... Read more
Previous | Contents | Next But yesterday wasn’t my day. I got flagged down by a cop on the motorway near the railway station. I decided to wait until they’d all gone off duty after rush hour. I started out but the bike went a mile and stopped. I primed it again ... Read more