My parents gave me two very special gifts. One was the love of all things related to words, foreign languages and reading, this last much aided by a fertile imagination. By the age of 7 when I transferred into junior school I had already read all the set books we were due to read in the coming year and I was bored stiff in the reading lessons. We didn’t have a TV in our house until I was 11 and my grandparents came to live with us, bringing with them their black and white TV. Up until then our entertainment came from listening to the radio and I can well remember being ill one day, lying on the sofa in the living room, listening to a radio production of The Hobbit. It was the episode where the hobbits go through Mirkwood and, in my fevered imagination, I could see faces in the uneven surface of the plaster in the ceiling. It was terrifying….

The other was a love of natural history. Given the opportunity I would most certainly have had one of those cabinets of miracles as I was always a magpie of a collector and hoarder. I learned the names of all the wildflowers to be found in the woods and hedgerows. My mother had a book of black and white illustrations of wildflowers which she had started to paint, including annotations of when and where she had found them. I carried on this interest and later insisted on having my own copy of the book. At weekends our family would go on geological forays to disused coal tips where we would find fossil ferns or to the
Dorset coast where we would find ammonites, fossil flowers, sharks teeth and devils toenails on the beach at Lyme Regis. I collected shells, abandoned birds eggs, etc. etc and could identify all the birds that came to our garden. At the end of our garden I had my own flowerbed and learned the names of all the garden plants. I spent hours in the greenhouse with my grandfather where he regaled me with tales of his childhood.

Nowadays, I am still a collector, but only of the photographs I take of all things fauna and flora. Perhaps I should add that I collect books as well. But you probably already guessed that …