I must have made a lot of pictures as a child, but just the few here have survived. At Kilburn Grammar School, Art was the only one of my four A-levels for which I earned a distinction. I could draw things put in front of me but had no imagination for creating images. Red-green colour blindness, never detected at school, made painting a problem. At Harrow Tech and KCL, I spent time sketching other students when I probably should have been in the library, the physiology lab or the dissecting room. I would sometimes do the odd portrait sketch, on holiday, for example, but after dropping out of the King’s Faculty of Medicine I stopped drawing. Two decades or more later, it felt as if it might help when I was going through a difficult time. Morley College was just a couple of hundred yards from my office at the COI and for a few years I attended life classes under John Flemons, head of the art department. A little later I joined Saturday morning sessions with John Nicol at the Camden Arts Centre, also an easy walk from my Hampstead flat in Maresfield Gardens. I found life studies totally absorbing, always happy to plunge straight in, usually taking little notice of any advice offered. The tutors seemed happy to leave me alone, as they also did at the Slade summer school I treated myself to. After early retirement, now living in Muswell Hill, I was very fortunate to encounter among the parents of my children’s school-friends a group of near neighbours, some of them professional artists, who met weekly in each other’s homes, hired a model and just drew.