England – Centre of the Web

Featured image: ‘Lunchtime Concerts’ 1979; Pencil and collage on paper (College project)

When I left college in 1981, I was offered a council flat on the eighth floor of a tower block in Wood Green, London, so I took it. I had to go through seven doors and a lift to get out, but I didn’t think about it then, I was living in a totally ungrounded, drug-filled fantasy world, and so being in the air suited me. I imagined it as my high-rise apartment in New York. The famous artist. This is who I believed I wanted to become. But I was extremely self-critical, not even knowing I was being so hard on myself. It had been a normal part of my childhood. This and my lack of confidence kept me in a cycle of wanting to block this harshness out.

After 3 years at college, I had had enough of Graphics and began doing freelance illustration. I did commissions for The Magic Circle, BBC, Channel 4, The Fiction Magazine, Spare Rib, World Wildlife Fund, Live Aid and various publishers. My work was small, black and white in ink or pencil, and it was detailed.

Gemini. A commission for ‘The Complete Astrologer’ by Derek and Julia Parker. 1981

I also explored my own realistic and abstract artwork and crafts, sculpture, clothes design, generally with a nature or recycling theme. Artwork was my healing journey from a childhood bereft of emotional comfort.

Embroidery eagles for a shirt collar. 1981

My work got bigger and bigger in size as my confidence grew.

‘Blue Grass’ 1981 pencil and watercolour on paper.

In 1982, when I was 23 I had a motorbike accident and broke my leg in three places. The woman I was living with, Yvette was on the back and thankfully only bruised her knee. It was a complex fracture and they couldn’t operate immediately as I had friction burns on my leg. I found myself in traction, (they put a pin through the ankle and dangle a weight from it to pull apart the bones so they can realign them. Sounds like torture and it was!). Obviously some nurses and doctors were considerate but my experience of doctors standing at the end of my bed with their white coats on and clipboards talking about my condition without including me, stuck with me. Also asking a nurse for a bedpan and being told it wasn’t time for the bedpan round and I must wait. These were just two examples of emotionally unsafe behaviours that stayed with me for a long time. It was frightening.

Yvette came to visit me every day and when I came out of hospital I vowed I would never see a doctor again as I had felt so out of control. It was another pivotal moment where I began unconsciously building my need for complete autonomy and to find a healing space. The accident completely woke me up. I wanted a more spiritual life and I started to explore complementary medicine, diet and fasting to improve my physical health.

I met Simo and Checca, the Italian twins at the women’s bathing pond at Hampstead Heath. Yvette moved out and they came to live with me. They had been brought up in rural Italy and moved to London when they were 11. They had gone to school at the famous Summerhill and were very open minded. They were outgoing sannyasins, disciples of Osho, an Indian Guru and I loved living with them. Through Osho, I learned about meditation, mysticism and spirituality. It was comforting and life affirming. Seeing life through the perspective of spirituality created a positive outlook. I also found a book called “You can heal your life” by Louise Hay and read it over and over. Its basic principle is “you are in control of your mind; it is not in control of you” and she provides exercises to let go of past painful conditioning and find that empowering place of being in control. She is also the queen of positive affirmations.

Simo, Checca and I visited Italy for months and I loved it there. They both also knew about wholefoods and introduced me to cooking brown rice.

In 1987, when I was 28, I was having a conversation with my friend Roger and someone I had just met. This person asked me what I did for a living. I avoided the question and mumbled something about crafts. Roger said ‘she’s an artist!’ That was the first time I began to give myself that title.

That same year, Checca and I went to live in Italy. This created the real foundation for my connection with nature. My first activity was to collect figs from a tree and eat them, I loved it and it made complete sense to me. We collected and cracked pine nuts on a stone and made pesto with fresh basil. We stayed with Checca’s dad for a while. He was an accomplished artist. He foraged, including mushrooms.

‘Antonio’s Garden’ 1990 ink on paper.(Checca’s dad’s house)

After almost a year with Checca’s dad and also staying at our friend Roberto’s house, we found a house to live in at the edge of a quiet village in the countryside. I meditated, (working on my inner demons of depression) and got a job working for Walt Disney drawing cartoons of Donald Duck for ‘Paperino Mese’. I would work at home during the week and go to Milan on Saturdays to the Walt Disney Studio to have my work assessed.

In 1990, when I was 31, I came back to the flat in London which had been kept on by Simo. Checca stayed in Italy, Simo moved out of the flat and I lived there on my own.

As I was healing, the eighth floor of a noisy tower block next to a main road with noisy neighbours all round me and no sound insulation, became a place of deep suffering. I could even hear my neighbour Tracey downstairs sweeping the floor. The sound of Tracey’s bass-heavy music in the night for two years and environmental health being unable to catch her brought me to a nervous breakdown, a catharsis, in 1998 and I was sent to a psychiatric hospital for a week. I then spent further spells in crisis centres and took anti-depressants until one day during a massage at the crisis centre, I broke down and exclaimed to the masseuse, “I’ve lost my soul”. I stopped the anti-depressants immediately.

The outer issue was always noise. The noise that humans create which, to me, made the sounds of nature harder and harder to hear. I longed for silence and the only sounds being the sounds of nature, I was obsessed with it. I felt breathless without it. I told a carer in the crisis centre that I longed to hear the sound of the birds and she said “well, we’ve got a birdsong tape!” I could have screamed; she didn’t get it. I wanted to be so immersed in nature that there was no separation. Birdsong on a tape was just another human invention and all part of my disconnected environmental crisis. I wanted the real thing, but I was on the dole, DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security) feeling ashamed and guilty. My friend Prabhu helped when he said, ‘Don’t feel guilty, it’s DHSS—Divine Help for Spiritual Seekers!`. I was living on £50 a week, no money in the bank and living, ‘existing’ in a noisy tower block in London. Sometimes I sat on my balcony at the flat with my hands over my ears, rocking from the insanity of the noise; traffic, household noises from uninsulated flats, police sirens, fire engines…and nature seemingly so far away out of my reach. My solace was to walk through Alexandra Palace park to Crouch End to buy my shopping from the health food store. Alexandra Palace was a walk across a little park next to my allotment and over the railway bridge. I also started to see counsellors and this gave me a feeling of strength and security. However, I couldn’t get out of the flat. No-one wanted to home swap to a tower block, I was trapped.

I was continuously burdened with the thoughts of how to raise enough money as an artist to get a mortgage and buy my own place. It was a crazy idea, I was an Artist! Money was an alien concept, and consistently making money without feeling utterly stressed was even more alien. I had been on and off the dole for years, coming off to do a few months of freelance work and then signing back on again. I couldn’t cope with the pressure of relentless work; it sucked the joy and the purpose out of making art. Thinking only of the conventional route clearly wasn’t for me, but what was the solution?

I spent the next few years going in and out of the crisis centre, figuring out in my mind, what I wanted. On one visit, I met a man who did photography. He showed me one of his pictures. It was a barge going through a tunnel and there was a small bright light at the end. It made me ask, “What is my light at the end of the tunnel?” and my first thought was “America”! So I made that a goal. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my trip to America was to be another foundation for my deep inner craving for a more natural life.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, England

Deadpan Dave

May 11, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

There are all kinds and manners of farming in the rural county of Devon, in South West England. There are large scale industrial farmers of beef, dairy cattle and sheep, heavily subsidized big business, right down to subsistence level organic farmers, and down again (or sideways) to hobby farmers, and everything in-between. My friend Dave was in-between. His family kept a few cattle, for home beef consumption but also as a small supplementary income to be drawn from their few fields on the edge of the village. Not a personal hobby as such but certainly a tradition in those parts.

Once, Dave made to attack me with a large kitchen knife. He was laughing maniacally. We were in his kitchen at the time. We had drunk a little. We were used to play fighting on occasion, but he had never picked up a knife before. He swiped it very close to me, advancing up the narrow kitchen, and I shouted for him to back off and told him not to be so stupid. He eventually ceased the knife play and apologized. I thought he had lost it. I was scared.

Dave was one in a series of intense homoerotic friendships I have had in my life. And like the others, it ceased quite suddenly. I feel guilty about this, as though it was me who suddenly ended the friendships, but I dont think that is exactly true. It is more complicated. Dave once told me he was (is) gay. Now he is married to a woman, with kids. When he lived somewhere else in Devon for a while, away from his family home, before he got married, he heard his neighbours talking about him through the wall. He became psychotic. I was not there to help him. I had had enough psychosis of my own to deal with.

Once, I saw him after a long break. I asked him how his dad was. He replied in a deadpan way, ‘He’s dead’.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, England

Building Silent Haven: Introduction & Chapter One

April 27, 2026April 27, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

INTRODUCTION

I come from a background where feelings and needs were not discussed, leaving me somewhat in the dark as to who I was and what I needed in life. I did know quite clearly from an early age that art was a major source of joy and comfort and this was my saving grace. In adulthood I was unconfident and unsure about my choices but assumed that if I worked hard I could become a well known artist. I used to have visions of living in an exclusive apartment in New York and having shows in major galleries. Finding that I had major obstacles to this route, (I hated being out there and doing publicity, or talking about money for my freelance art commissions, for example) I lived frugally and just made art. Over the years the pressure built up, my choices of environment were very limited and this made me ill. I had no idea I had inner cravings for a natural way of life let alone how to achieve it. Eventually, the dam burst and the river flowed out freely but not in the way I expected. Looking back, the journey that I went on was so much more in tune with who I am and what my needs are. This journey was much more nourishing than I could ever wish for. In a labour of love, the idol that took shape came to be known as Silent Haven.

CHAPTER ONE

In 1963, when I was five, my parents, brother and I moved from the home I was born in, in Yorkshire, to Leicester. The house was newly built and there were no other houses surrounding it; it was surrounded by open fields and felt spacious. That didn’t last. Houses were being built around us. My fondest memories were the first few days as the electricity and gas hadn’t been connected yet. It had a significant impact on me, and I remembered this when my partner and I started building the cabin at Silent Haven. There was no time to get the furniture in place before dark, so we all slept on mattresses on the floor in the lounge. My mom made food on a little camping gas stove, and we burned candles. There was a fireplace, and we lit a fire. I loved it. It was atmospheric; we were in it together, camping, surviving, basic and connected in this marvellous adventure.

That was one of the best nights I ever had in that house. Then this chaotic but casual and relaxed atmosphere began to disappear. The electricity and gas were turned on so the cooking was done in its proper place in the kitchen, with food being eaten at the table. My spirits sank when the beautiful warm and exciting hub of the house got filled up with an ugly gas fire and I don’t think they ever recovered. The place just wasn’t the same after that and it felt like neither were the relationships. After that first night it was back to the frosty barrier of my brilliant, but controlling and frightening mother. I thought my upbringing was normal until years later when my school friend Claire said my mother ‘ruled me with a rod of iron’. My dad provided relief by cracking silly jokes and making me laugh, but anything emotional was immediately swept under the carpet.

The house sat in a lovely woodland garden. I loved the feeling of the trees surrounding and protecting us on two sides and how beautiful they were but we were on the corner plot, and it was otherwise very open. As the other houses were being built I retreated in doors more and more as I was painfully shy. My parents were about the only people in the neighbourhood who wanted to keep their trees; everyone else must have thought they were a nuisance, because they were getting cut down. I only realised after doing a session of eco-therapy at university, how disconnected I had been from the earth —this was until I bought Silent Haven, this land that quenched a long period of dehydration.

After the electricity-free night in my new childhood home, I asked for a paraffin lamp as my bedside lamp. Stepping back into my inner child’s shoes, I feel I was responsible enough to have one. Of course, the answer was no. The compromise was a fake paraffin lamp, with a fixed key I could pretend to turn to raise the light level and a removable bowl. I loved that lamp nevertheless.

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My childhood lamp

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My parents were very creative and resourceful, and this is the thread for my way of life. I decided to become an artist at the age of 12. Fast forward to 1977, at the age of 18 I spent a year doing an Art Foundation Course at Leicester Polytechnic. It was situated in a beautiful old school. My dad would take me early before anyone else got there so I had time to adjust my hair and my make-up. The course consisted of all kinds of art: life drawing, sculpture, oil painting, illustration, photography and textiles. I loved it and wanted a degree in all these subjects but I had to choose one subject. I chose Graphic Design, I think because that was the most likely to make money. My grandparents were from a poor mining background and that was still in my system.

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Metamorphosis, 1977

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I left home in 1978 at aged 19 and went to St Martin’s School of Art in London and lived in Ralph West Hall of Residence for the first year, just beside Battersea Park. I loved the communal living. Although I had art as a meditation, I was on a destructive path of depression, drinking, smoking and experimenting with different types of drugs. I had been brought up in a household where, although I had many physical privileges, which I was grateful for, my mother had been in control of my life and on moving to London, I suddenly had complete freedom yet didn’t know who I was. I was trying to make sense of my world but was vulnerable and without boundaries. I was also extremely sensitive to noise and I didn’t realise this. Certain noises deeply triggered me, but at that time I didn’t know what they were. The drugs and alcohol numbed the fear.

Category: England

Building Silent Haven: Chapter Two