My Journey
My life long learning began the day I left a grim boarding school behind me and stepped out, not into a conventional route but one with infinite open doorways.
Looking back, I am almost grateful to the unhappy neurotic women teachers who labelled me hopeless and useless: I began working at a hop farm in Kent and connected with the first of many people who began the process of restoring confidence and self esteem in me. Including some Irish anarchists who taught me to listen and learn.
My next decision was to pursue learning but to avoid all the subjects I had tried to like at school and look in very different directions. I was lucky and privileged enough to be able to make random choices - hence a degree in Scandinavian studies with a year teaching in northern Sweden and memorable summers working in Iceland. A chance encounter led me to study linguistics and consider a PhD but I turned away from academia and took a job teaching in Greece where I became part of the cultural and political reaction to the fall of the Junta [Military Dictatorship], translating and writing with Greek musicians and writers.
I came back to London in the late 1970s and was fortunate to find freelance work and even more fortunate when by chance I was asked to do some musician interviews for The Sunday Times Magazine in the early 1980s. This led to a job as an editor of a section - and I enjoyed years of learning and working alongside leading editors and writers and photographers.
But in 1987 I made a life changing discovery: quite randomly I was shown my first CD Rom and the door opened into the emerging digital world. I was completely transfixed by the rich, non-linear, multi-media potential offered and with a genuine, completely focused drive I pivoted from print out into a technical universe in which learning became an hourly if not daily experience as everything accelerated in terms of development.
I never looked back for over 25 years! I consistently shifted environments as each sector adapted to online structures - retail, education, pharma, branding - as well as creative entrepreneurship. I was a parent too, during these hectic years and switched between free-lance and full-time in order to be around for teenagers at home. Plus I survived a couple of near burn-outs - the working world became ever more demanding!
So from 2017 I returned to a free-lance existence and breathed more deeply! Lots of collaborations on social rather than commercial projects using my range of skills. And a return to journalism.
My Books and Works
In the early 1980s when I was a freelance music writer I was fortunate to meet filmmaker Jeremy Marre who had made a number of documentaries for C4 and BBC about music - both new and traditional - from countries round the globe. He asked if I would work with him on a book covering the content of the films and creating a global music story. The term World Music was a commercial term used to market music from outside the Western mainstream.
Positive Lives
In 1993 at the height of the HIV/ AIDS pandemic, Network Photographers produced a documentation examining the wider impact of the illness - timed to coincide with ten years of the Terence Higgins Trust’s activities. Following this, Network worked with the Trust and Concern Worldwide to create a global collection of images of all those affected by the pandemic that could be used to hold conversations in communities around the world. I worked with Lyndall Stein and design group Luminous to structure and write this book. It was a meaningful experience to understand and reveal the many aspects of pain and tragedy experienced at different levels. Partners, widows, orphans alI surviving on a daily basis, comparable though culturally different. I was especially touched by how some of the support teams hung a selection of pictures in trees so a shared sense of suffering could be had. Despite the advance in antiretroviral therapies, many countries struggle to support those with the illness.
The teacher's guide to creative learning
I was very fortunate to be able to participate in the Creative Partnerships project for three years in 2003. This was a visionary, transformative approach to education, involving creativity, collaboration and enquiry led learning across 36 boroughs in England. I came in to help develop a platform to share knowledge and project information and finished by having the privilege to put together the Teachers’ guide to Creative Learning. This shaped my outlook on 21st century innovation for young people (as envisaged by the legendary Sir Ken Robinson) and I was very lucky to work with exceptional individuals such as Anna Cutler (director in Kent, later at Tate). Remarkable thinking, projects, people and results.
Makers of the
Twentieth Century
In 1991 I plunged into the new world of digital content. This was a huge move from the world of magazines- text, photos, illustrations and ads. We were charged with bringing the long-standing archive of The Times (1785 to present) to life in the form of CDRoms: original reports were enhanced with contextualised texts, images, videos and integrated into a themed narrative with multiple layers and cross links. Our users were the focus so the logical and emotional navigation through the content was our priority. Over 4 years, with a remarkable team of enthusiastic digital newbies, we produced histories of WW1, WW2, Cold War, Industrial Revolution, Women’s Rights, Environmental Awareness. We also produced Makers of the Twentieth Century - an overview through the mini biographies of key change-makers. This won the EMMA award and I am proud as editorial director to have worked with great people to achieve all this - each day brought new surprises, challenges and insights.
Special thanks to Barry Lewis for providing the photography throughout the website