Details

I am retired.
A very eventful life beginning with profound developmental delay that can only be due to dyslexia, nevertheless a gift. The search is for patterns and links, not answers.

Once I got going and learned to overcome the dyslexia on my own,  progress was rapid. Many art prizes, and still painting. A blossoming in the subject of biology.
An exciting and overwhelming challenging career in medicine, from paediatrics to general practice in Bulwell, Nottingham, before and during the miners’ strike. Also part time specialist in palliative care at Hayward House, City Hospital. From the early 1980s an interest in clinic hypnosis. This opened up extraordinary deep avenues of communication.
Unusual patients with otherworldly skills seemed gravitate to me. A lot was learnt.

Probably the most influential book I read after “On the origin of species” was Teilhard  de Chardin’s “Phenomenon of man” when I was 18.                                                                       The next important text was given to me by my second clinical patient when a student, a relative of Viktor Frankel, was his “Man’s search for meaning”.

The unusual name I carry dates to one of my ancestors emigrating to Nouvelle France at the beginning of the 17 century. An extraordinary family. One of the granddaughters married into the Grants. Very much my enemy’s enemy is my ally. That’s that out of the way!
I live in the countryside in Wiltshire in a wonderful 13th century longhouse.  My other home is in the King’s Lieutenant’s House in Navarrenx, in the Béarn of the very bottom of South West France, very much the land of Tréville, d’Artagnon and the three musketeers.
My joys are good company, reading, exploring reality, philosophy, the whole panoply of natural history, hypnosis in clinical practice, cooking and fine French wine.
Crowned by daily walks discovering the ever changing flora and fauna.