I entered the world in the first half of the decade of the1950s. England the heart of the British Commonwealth, a country at the centre of an empire that was struggling after the second great world war.

It was a time of austerity with rationing, strikes and power cuts. Hong Kong, Australia, the Caribbean and Canada were all destinations within the commonwealth.

And the recently crowned young Queen with a handsome husband, showed the stoic way which the inhabitants of the empire would over come all hardships and succeed. It was this post war attitude that led to the optimism of the 1960’s and all it’s ‘Swinging-ness’.

Although I was born in England, it was to an Irish, Latin catholic family. Both my mother and father came from large families and I spent my childhood in England playing in the bombsites of derelict buildings and the summers back in Ireland for the harvest, surrounded by cousins, uncles and aunts.

Not many had a telephone or television and there was only one channel the British Broadcasting Corporation, which suffered constant intermissions in transmission.

My first introduction to media as a three year old was riding my tricycle around block were we lived and watching a man with a flat bed truck climb a ladder which he brought with rolls of paper, and paste weekly new advertising posters which were illustrations not photographic on side wall of the cobblers. That and listening to the wireless/radio that I wasn’t allowed to tune were my world.

As a child, I thought this man in the brown boiler suit that came with brown truck from More O’Farrell’s, with brushes and paste had painted these pictures himself and this was his way of displaying his work. Eventually as I travelled further afield and saw more billboards if they were images I knew I just put them down to my artist getting around and if they were different to ones that I wasn’t familiar with, then that must be another artist. I would decide whether it was better of worse, thus the critic was born.

As a six year old in 1960, the world was divided by an ‘Iron Curtain’ of communism and locked into a ‘Space Race’ to put humans into orbit, and the ever present threat of global annihilation from the arsenal of newly discovered atomic devices.

Grandfather Mulligan was in the Eire civil defence force, I remember being horrified by his illustrated manuals on what to do in the event of a nuclear bomb. To drive it home there was a gruesome black and white film on the same subject with footage from Hiroshima, which we were mandatorily shown at school.

What with child murders and the war in Vietnam in the newspapers daily, I pounced at any chance to get lost in books and fashion magazines.

Mother’s father, grandfather Rogerson, after a horse riding accident in his youth was put to work as a tax collector and tailor. He would sit crossed legged on the kitchen table and play the flute my mother told me later. But from a child’s point of view, he was a much scarier proposition. He was there when mother gave birth to my sister, he was immaculate in a three-piece suit with tightly cropped hair under a Homburg hat and highly polished thick-soled leather shoes.

I had always said to mum that I had found him a little intimidating and just before she died in 2016 she pointed out that I was older than he had been I my memory and that I looked exactly like him.

The Marist Brothers, a catholic order at the Rosary, in Birmingham and St. Andrew’s in Dumfries taught me. It was bother Gabrielle that pushed me go for art school by taking the exams when I came back from Scotland and I got into Moseley School of Art at the age of 13.

Mother’s father, grandfather Roberson, after a horse riding accident in his youth was put to work as a tax collector and tailor. He would sit crossed legged on the kitchen table and play the flute my mother told me later. But from a child’s point of view, he was a much scarier proposition. He was there when mother gave birth to my sister, he was immaculate in a three-piece suit with tightly cropped hair under a Homburg hat and highly polished thick-soled leather shoes. I had always said to mum that I had found him a little intimidating and just before she died in 2016 she pointed out that I was older than he had been I my memory and that I looked exactly like him. The Marist Brothers, a catholic order at the Rosary, in Birmingham and St. Andrew’s in Dumfries taught me. It was bother Gabrielle that pushed me go for art school by taking the exams when I came back from Scotland and I got into Moseley School of Art at the age of 13.