Longtime Ago people

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  • A Life in Motion: Diving Deep, Travelling Far, Playing Loud

    Southwick sets the tone for this conversation — a small Sussex village with a stubborn sense of itself, a green at its centre, and a quiet confidence that mirrors the man I’m sitting down with. That grounding matters, because Lee Pryor’s memories are rooted in real streets, real work, and the everyday texture of post‑war Britain. From there, we head back to 1950s Great Yarmouth, a seasonal seaside town full of returning families, guest houses, theatres, piers, and long car journeys before motorways existed. Lee tells me about cleaning rooms on changeover day, earning pocket money from holidaymakers, and learning to harmonise while working — the early signs of how music, community, and graft can grow together inside a family.

    A thread runs right through his life: performance begins early and never really leaves. His dad worked as a beachfront photographer, using a clever trick to spot willing customers before spending film, then posting prints once they were home. Around that, Lee absorbed theatre culture through his mum and nan, even remembering seeing George Formby live. And then comes the pivot: a childhood singing competition on the seafront. He sings a cappella. He wins. A tiny moment with lifelong consequences. Boarding school follows — a shock that becomes a lesson in independence, freedom, and self‑reliance, with bikes, fishing, farms, and open space shaping his confidence.

    From teenage Brighton we get the Mod era in lived detail: scooters, Dyke Road meet‑ups, Kemptown coffee bars, jukebox staples like The Who and Small Faces, and the beach as a social hub. A family argument then becomes the unlikely trigger for joining the Royal Navy, where he trains as an aircraft engineer and later qualifies as a ship’s diver. The dive course sounds brutal: freezing water, leaking dry suits, no gloves, near‑zero visibility, and pressure designed to break you before it builds you. That skill leads to early dives on the Mary Rose site, when only a few timbers showed above the mud and slack tide windows were narrow and unforgiving.

    After the Navy, the story shifts into a travel documentary hiding inside a life story. Lee chases adventure that feels less packaged than naval port calls — London jobs, casino life as a croupier during an era of big money, and then signing up as crew for overland travel across Africa. With almost no notice, he’s handed a Bedford truck, paperwork, visas, and cash, and drives it out of Bond Street despite never having driven one before. Crossing into North Africa, he describes the realities of borders, currencies, and the informal economy of getting through checkpoints. Later, Switzerland brings a different kind of intensity: full‑time DJ work in Montreux, vinyl only, long nights, jazz culture, and famous faces walking through the door — including David Bowie and musicians tied to the town’s recording history.

    The later chapters show a pattern of reinvention as survival and instinct. Financial hardship and poor mortgage advice push Lee into financial services so he can understand money and help others avoid the same mistakes. He rebuilds with the support and organisation of Fran. Then comes a second creative life: auditioning for a Led Zeppelin tribute band, selling his business, and touring the UK as a Robert Plant frontman — a dream that only works with real partnership at home. And in the end, we circle back to character: a maverick streak, a need for individuality, and gratitude for a mother who encouraged him to travel, try, and keep moving.

    For listeners who love personal history, Royal Navy diving, the Mary Rose story, overland Africa travel, Montreux music lore, and the reality of starting again, this episode is a reminder that a life can have many chapters without ever losing its core drive.

  • The People Who Raised the Man

    A grey sky over Hayling Island sets the tone for my conversation with Steve — a life traced from a Portsmouth childhood to a family legacy built on service, graft, and decency. As he talks, I can almost see the texture of those 1960s streets: doors left open, relatives within ten roads, and then the moment that shaped him — the day the children stood between their parents during a row. His mum’s resolve becomes the first anchor of the story. She worked multiple jobs, fought maintenance battles in court, and kept going even when there was no food in the house. Her tenacity and moral compass formed Steve’s lifelong ethic: show up, do the right thing, keep moving. In a world that often romanticises resilience, her version is the real thing — quiet endurance without applause.

    Family widens in unexpected ways. Ray, his mum’s long‑term partner, never married her yet lived as “grandad” for decades. A Royal Marine and survivor of a Japanese POW camp, Ray was gentle until old ghosts stirred. When Steve saw his own children grieve Ray as deeply as any blood relative, it reframed what family truly means. Lineage is lived, not just inherited.

    Then comes Bob, Steve’s father‑in‑law — the model of the dad he never had. A railwayman turned JP, Bob embodied duty, courtesy, and generosity. Early on, he challenged young love out of care for his daughter, but everything changed the night he introduced Steve as “my son.” That single sentence marked a rite of passage into a family — and into a standard of living where honour leads.

    Love threads through with Julie, who met Steve at eleven and became the gravitational force of his life. Their story matured into a partnership built on loyalty and shared graft, foreshadowing the family business they would later build together — a business grounded in clarity, empathy, and staying power.

    Work is where Jasmine (Jazz) steps from student to mentor. Steve introduced supermarket discipline into financial advice, then wills and trusts. Jazz entered, earned every step, and grew in qualifications, effectively translating complexity into plain English. When a seizure sidelined Steve, clients turned to her for support. She didn’t just lead — she enhanced the culture, promoting a more collaborative atmosphere with calm guidance.

    The business now carries its values into “afterlife meetings”, where grieving families receive clear explanations and a map for what comes next. It’s service at its most human: presence, patience, and the promise to lift weight from shoulders.

    Across every chapter — mum’s grit, Ray’s constancy, Bob’s honour, Julie’s steady love, and Jasmine’s clarity — one creed repeats: family first, help when you can, and don’t be a dick. It’s plain speech for a layered truth: build a life others can trust, and measure success by the care you leave behind.

  • The Valleys, the Island, and Everything Between

    Belonging doesn’t always arrive with a postcode. As I sit with Sarah, I’m struck by how her story moves from the Welsh valleys, through Oxfordshire, and finally to the Isle of Wight, yet the thread running through it all is community — the noisy, generous kind that leaves back doors open and always puts another plate on the table. She paints a vivid picture of Wales: music drifting through every room, neighbours who feel like kin, and a culture that lifts you up even when it argues with you. That warmth met a different rhythm in England, where people felt more reserved, but the island offered a balance — fewer relatives, more chosen family. It reminds me that home isn’t a map dot; it’s a feeling built through rituals, kindness, and the people you keep showing up for.

    Cars punctuate Sarah’s memories like mile markers. A mum who loved small, fast cars and treated the road as freedom. The mini that made every lane feel like a racetrack. The red Peugeot 205 that set the bar for a driving school. Later, Sheila’s Wheels — a cheeky nod to her mum’s gifted car — becomes a symbol of continuity, even as independence shifts with age. These aren’t just stories about vehicles; they’re stories about agency, dignity, and the way a parent’s love is measured in late-night lifts and long drives to sports matches. When her mum had to stop driving, the grief wasn’t about a licence — it was about a life lived on her own terms.

    Her dad’s story is quieter and deeper. Deaf since childhood due to meningitis, he learned to speak names by feeling vibrations under the chin, read rooms without sound, and dance by sensing the floor. It flips the script on ability: silence didn’t erase expression; it simply re‑routed it. Their household played music freely — no “shh, dad’s sleeping” — and friends loved visiting because nothing had to be hushed. The world often treats deafness as absence; Sarah reveals it as another kind of presence, full of humour, tenderness, and its own language.

    The valleys also hold harder truths. Since the mines closed, too many communities were left without a clear path forward. Sarah speaks honestly about the generational drag and the danger of waiting for work to return rather than travelling to find it. Yet she holds that realism alongside a deep pride in Welsh culture. That duality — love and frustration — underpins her own pivot: a break from work that became a calling through volunteering. Cats Protection offered structure and purpose; the Wildheart Animal Sanctuary opened a wider world of animal care, from gardening days to standing awestruck before a roaring white lion.

    Fundraising turned fear into fuel: abseiling down the Spinnaker Tower, shaving her head, rallying friends to help bring ex-circus tigers to safety. These aren’t stunts; they’re proof that ordinary people can bankroll extraordinary rescues when the cause is clear. Now she channels that energy into group bookings and community events — a Gavin & Stacey quiz night for the local cat centre, complete with homegrown photos and local banter. Village life hums in the background: celebrity connections, chip shops named for dart scores, cakes from the side of a van, neighbours swapping papers at seven o’clock sharp.

    Threaded through it all is pop culture as compass: Teletext TVs for subtitles, the first family video recorder, and a lifelong devotion to Jaws that grew into a dream of cage-diving with great whites. By the end, Sarah’s journey feels like a map of resilience: shaped by family, steered by service, and fuelled by curiosity. The lesson she leaves me with is simple and strong: when the work changes, when the road turns, when the music stops, build your own rhythm. Choose your people. And keep moving towards the things that make you feel most alive.

  • Finding Reg Rogers

    It’s a striking truth about the First World War: a huge proportion of British soldiers who died have no known grave. Many were buried where they fell, lost to artillery, or laid to rest in makeshift cemeteries that vanished as the front moved. Today, hundreds of thousands are either commemorated on memorials to the missing or lie in graves marked simply as “A Soldier of the Great War — Known Unto God.”

    Family history often hides in plain sight until someone opens an old file, reads a name aloud, and changes the way a family sees itself. That’s exactly what happened when a message from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission reached a cousin and set in motion a year‑long path to a rededication service for Company Sergeant Major Reginald Clarence Rogers of the Royal Marines Light Infantry. The story moves from inbox to cemetery, from doubt to proof, and from private pride to public remembrance. In my discussion with Matt, I learnt how battlefield records, unit diaries, and careful mapping can reveal a single identity among thousands of unknown dead on the Somme — and why keeping these memories alive still matters. This is not nostalgia; it is restoration, and it reshapes how the living carry the past.
    The first jolt is always disbelief: is this real, and is it us? With no direct descendants from Reg’s line, the Ministry of Defence traced sideways through a sister and down to living relatives. What followed was a careful, human process. A small, dedicated team at the Commission cross‑referenced graves registration reports, concentration returns, and Royal Marines Light Infantry war diaries. They filtered a list of company sergeant majors by location and date, matching a recovery site near the River Ancre to a unit’s exact position. DNA wasn’t used; the case was built on paper and logic. When a wartime burial is intact, exhumation is avoided, so certainty must be earned through records. On Reg’s date of death, his unit stood within metres of the spot, and no other candidate fit. In a landscape dense with memorials, this rare alignment gave a name back to a stone.
    Standing at the rededicated grave alters time. The service gathered a Royal Marine bugler, a Major, a chaplain, veterans, and family who had never expected to be part of such a moment. Wreaths from the Royal Marines, the British Legion, and the Commission framed the headstone. The tone was warm, direct, and exacting — rank acknowledged, service honoured, sacrifice understood. A company sergeant major from the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone attended because he holds the same rank today. That detail bridged a century of training, duty, and esprit de corps. Grief, pride, and gratitude arrived together, proving that remembrance is not an abstract ritual but an embodied act in a specific place, shared by strangers who become kin for an hour.
    The research opened a broader map of Reg’s life. Born in Kent in 1889, he served across the empire before war, mobilised at once in 1914, and earned the Military Medal for leading guides who brought units to the jumping‑off line at Gavrelle in 1917. He died in March 1918 during the fighting on the Ancre. His brother also fell and lies only miles away — a second thread in the family’s line of service. After the ceremony, the family visited local museums where farmers’ fields still yield buckles, badges, and shells. A local collector holds binoculars engraved with Reg’s name, found at a French brocante — a reminder that personal kit still circulates, waiting for hands that recognise it. These objects are not curios; they are evidence, anchors for memory, and possible bridges home.
    Legacy reached forward as well as back. The family’s Royal Marines ties span generations: a grandfather who served with Churchill, a father with a green beret, a son considering reserves. The rededication made Remembrance Sunday less symbolic and more intimate, reframing the poppy as a marker of a specific man with a specific story. Across the Somme, poppy‑patterned carpets, coach tours, and carefully kept cemeteries show how remembrance has become both public history and quiet pilgrimage. Guides, archivists, and volunteers keep the circuits alive; families bring the spark that lights it. When an unknown grave gains a name, it changes more than one headstone. It restores a chapter to a family and adds clarity to the public record.
    There is still work to do: tracing the Military Medal, understanding the final movements of Reg’s unit, and returning — perhaps with younger children — to walk the fields with fresh eyes. The case also shows how often identities can still be found, only a handful each month, but each one matters. The Commission’s method blends archival rigour with empathy, and that combination brings healing without sentimentality. In a time when attention scatters fast, these careful acts of naming and ceremony pull us back to scale, context, and cost. They teach that memory is not automatic; it requires stewards. And when families answer the call, unknown becomes known, and the past stands up, salutes, and steps beside us.

  • Ziggy To Blackstar: How David Bowie Shaped A Generation

    When I sat down with Rupert, I found myself returning to a simple truth: David Bowie isn’t just an artist who makes music, he’s someone who rearranges your sense of time. That idea runs through our whole conversation. We start with that first electric jolt of hearing Space Oddity on the radio, and the life‑altering flash of seeing Starman on Top of the Pops. From there, we trace a path from teenage bedrooms and borrowed records to a shared language of style, friendship and risk. Bowie’s songs were never just hooks or textures; they were permission slips. Wear the colour. Change the hair. Try the other door. That sense of permission grew into a habit of curiosity that shaped choices far beyond playlists and posters.

    The 1972 eruption of Ziggy felt like a cultural gear change, but what Rupert and I kept circling was Bowie’s restless method. Reinvention wasn’t a stunt; it was a craft. The whole Ziggy cycle showed how character can become a container for ideas, while the American pivot of Young Americans reminded us that influence always runs both ways. Then came the Berlin years, where Low and “Heroes” turned the studio into a kind of laboratory, a place where silence and signal mattered as much as chorus. Those records still sound modern because they carve out space. Eno’s textures, Fripp’s wire, the pulse of Always Crashing in the Same Car — they evoke cities, rail lines, and the mind’s widescreen on cold mornings.

    We also talk about how Bowie’s choices seeped into daily life. Station to Station didn’t just play at parties; it edited how we walked into a room. The fashion cues — short hair, a neat shirt, a cigarette with a European name — telegraphed focus. Then came the 80s pivot: Let’s Dance, a clean‑lined pop engine that put him on stadium walls and in living rooms that had never bought a Bowie record. Whether you see those years as peak or compromise, they proved he could command the middle without dulling the edge. And Live Aid compressed that charisma into minutes — a reminder that presence is an instrument.

    There’s a tender thread running through all of this, too: the way songs become companions you carry into trains, kitchens and quiet moments. The late works sharpened that intimacy. The Next Day rekindled the spark, but Blackstar is the masterstroke – restless, cryptic, and generous with its final truths. Hearing it on release felt like receiving a coded letter you somehow understood. Mortality glints through Lazarus without melodrama; the band’s jazz angles keep the mind alert while the heart reads between the lines. Bowie’s integrity under pressure – his refusal to trade mystery for ease – remains a model for how to work when time is no longer abstract.

    Choosing five tracks is impossible, of course, but the impulse to choose is revealing. People reach for Life on Mars? when they crave wonder, for Rebel Rebel when they need friction, for “Heroes” when they want to stand a little taller. Others dig into the deeper cuts — Joe the Lion, Some Are, Always Crashing in the Same Car — because Bowie rewards attention with new rooms. His catalogue hides these doorways in plain sight, and every return visit redraws the map. That’s the durable gift: a body of work that keeps us curious, honest, and just a bit brave. In the end, we keep coming back because the songs keep finding ways to meet us where we are — and to walk a step ahead.

  • What Do We Inherit Beyond Our Names

    When doing my podcast Longtime Ago People, I often find that family history lives in the narrow spaces between memory and place, and this conversation with Ian is exactly that. I’m tracing a life carried between Sussex and South Africa, beginning with our two grandmothers who were sisters and a child born far from England by the quirk of a passport. The thread starts in Windhoek, runs through Cape Town and East London, and eventually loops back to Steyning in the coronation year.

    A father’s diagnosis forces a young family across oceans, and his loss reshapes everything — money gone, home gone, and a mother suddenly having to learn to work again. The tone isn’t sentimental; it’s exact. Night school for shorthand, a first secretarial job in Portslade, and the quiet shock of moving from servants to scarcity. The theme running through it all is resilience anchored by kin.

    What lifts the story beyond grief is Granddad Jim, a Sussex original whose life reads like a ledger of rural enterprise. He auctioneered cattle and furniture, bought a pub, wrapped horses’ hooves in cloth to smuggle French brandy over the Downs, and kept the family table full through fishing, shooting, and rows of vegetables by the cricket ground. He rented out his bathroom on Friday nights when neighbours still bathed in tin tubs, posted auction bills from a black trade bike, and told stories with two small boys tucked under his arms. These scenes ground the episode’s themes of family resilience, intergenerational memory, and rural English life. They’re practical lessons, too — how work ethic is modelled, how food systems looked before supermarkets, and how care often arrives as time and skill, not cash.

    South Africa stays vivid in Ian’s memory: manikin cigars flying from a carnival float, smoke from a grassfire racing uphill, a beach lagoon walled off from sharks. Decades later, he and his brother return just before COVID shuts the world down. Cape Town shines with its wind-and-mountain logic — property value by elevation and shelter — while East London feels uneasy, its parallel roads lined with idle youth and homes wired against crime. The Garden Route unspools like Australia: long distances of scrub and stone between townships. The journey becomes a reckoning with belonging and safety, a study in what endures and what declines, and a reflection on migration, identity, and diaspora memory.

    The professional arc arrives almost by accident. Piloting, once a dream, loses its glamour when a family member’s blunt briefing: minutes of thrill bookending hours of vigilance. Then a sixth‑form gap puts a teenager at the front of a classroom, just after the moon landings and their Hasselblad photographs made discovery feel possible. Teaching fits. It offers meaning and movement without leaving home entirely. This shift speaks to career pivots, vocational calling, and the way chance responsibilities can reveal an aptitude we didn’t know we had. Alongside, there’s mechanical comedy: a hand‑painted blue Riley that stains every fingertip and a lumbering Commer camper that rolls backwards down Welsh hills.

    Threaded through it all is the social history of a Sussex village becoming a commuter town, yet somehow keeping its charm. Names recur like waypoints: Jarvis Lane, the River Adur, Worthing, Chichester, Portslade. A red Sunbeam glows on a garage forecourt; a grandparent’s quiet loan steadies younger parents at a hard moment. The values are precise: loyalty within extended families, the dignity of manual skill, and the unashamed use of shared assets when times turn.

    In the end, the episode argues — without ever needing to say it outright — that identity is built from food gathered and cooked, from stories retold, and from choices made under pressure. Loss can’t be undone, but love can be practised like a craft, one task at a time.

  • Wiggy, Egg Sandwiches, Shared Baths & Cheeky Wiring  

    Family stories often arrive as small details—a nickname, a habit, a smell from a kitchen on a Sunday. Wiggy begins there. She earned her name from a halo of dark hair that never seemed to grey, a Londoner who found herself transplanted to Oxfordshire after a whirlwind start to adult life. Pregnant at sixteen, married to Ron against his family’s wishes, she navigated a world shaped by war and class expectations. The move cost Ron his inheritance; he traded land and status for love, and a bungalow he rushed to build before leaving for Africa with the army. Their son grew without his father for six years—war remapping their family like an abrupt line through a photograph. These pieces matter because they show how a single decision can change a lineage.

    Wiggy’s personality lives in contrasts: tender hospitality and sharp-tongued resentment, warmth for guests and cold memory for a husband she never forgave. Sundays meant tea, egg sandwiches sliced neat, and a house inexplicably cosy. Only later did the family learn why: Ron had wired their electricity to the neighbours on both sides—a roguish hack that kept fan heaters roaring without a bill to match. The scene is almost comic—comfort powered by a quiet transgression—but it frames a marriage where affection was rationed. Wiggy swore about Ron in private, then praised him on the day he died, as though grief rearranged her anger into something gentler. The emotions are messy, human, and familiar to anyone who has watched pride and pain coexist at a kitchen table.

    The wider clan deepens the portrait. On the other branch stands Doris, another Londoner, who fled Oxfordshire every weekend to dance in the city, leaving her daughter to manage the boys and the home. Both grans were pulled by London like a tide—one dragged away and stranded, one who always found the last bus back. Between their stories sit small rituals: shared baths among siblings and a younger uncle, cheap socials at the Smith’s Industries club, Christmas trees dressed on tight budgets. These are not grand adventures; they are the unvarnished rhythms of working families who made do, made jokes, and made memories strong enough to outlast the thin wallpaper of a rented hall.

    Time moves, and technology follows. The conversation turns to whether grandparents could bear the pace of today: iPads glowing on armchairs, FaceTime bridging 6,000 miles to South Africa, swipes too light or too hard for hands trained on spanners, not screens. Teaching an older parent to tap instead of press is a lesson in empathy as much as technique. For those who rode each iOS update year by year, shifts felt incremental. For a generation that skipped straight from rotary dials to video calls, the change can feel like a cliff. The wonder of seeing a son’s face across oceans wrestles with the frustration of missed rings and stubborn icons.

    One figure stands almost mythic: Uncle Mick, who left for South Africa at twenty-four and climbed fast—pools, company cars, and maids—a dream tinted by its era and later tempered by reality. Divorces thinned his luck; economics and age make the journey home too far now. Yet his arc shaped his nephew more than the engineers and grandparents did. It offered a map of ambition and change, a reminder that leaving is not always escape, and success is never a straight line. His life traces the cost of distance: material comfort balanced against an ache for home.

    What remains is grief, love, and the first hard lesson of loss. Many people meet death first through a grandparent; the shock is softer than a parent’s death but still seismic, opening a before and an after. Wiggy’s absence lingers in warm houses and salty egg sandwiches, in the punchline of stolen electricity and the punch of a word she used too freely for a quiet lounge. Family memory endures not because it is perfect but because it is precise. A nickname. A bus to London. A bath overfull. These details are the hooks we hang ourselves on—proof that ordinary lives carry the weight of history and the light of humour at the same time.

  • From a £99 Suit to the NYSE Bell 

    The story begins with a commute and a choice. Picture Napa Valley mornings at four, a 62-mile drive to San Francisco, and a life built around the reward of quiet weekends among vines. That rhythm frames a deeper arc—one about risk, mentorship, and the compounding value of saying yes before you feel ready.

    David’s journey goes back to 1985 London, when a teenager without university plans hunted for a way into finance and took a super-junior role in a petroleum department he barely understood. One BBC documentary later, he passed the interview, told a white lie about computers, and stepped into a world that would blend oil fields, trading floors, and the human networks that move markets.

    Learning started with humility and speed. Early days meant calls to oil companies, understanding North Sea licensing, and decoding progress from drill depths and mud. He became a well scout by persistence—asking, swapping small pieces of information, and earning the trust needed to stitch together a bigger picture. Those skills—curiosity, reciprocity, and pattern-spotting—set the foundation for moving into mergers and acquisitions, where ownership stakes in producing fields traded like engineered puzzles.

    When boredom hit at 21, David asked for more—and got Houston, along with a mentor who embodied range: a cowboy, a scout, a wildcatter. From there, the career stretched across continents, onto platforms in the North Sea, and onto the New York Stock Exchange balcony for the opening bell.

    Technology and market structure changed the job, but not the essence of it. The London floor’s paper tickets gave way to screens, algorithms, and dark pools, where massive pension orders move invisibly to avoid slippage. The role evolved into advising institutional portfolio managers, shaping the flows behind everyday pensions and 401(k)s. The stakes rose—half-billion orders, billion-dollar blocks—yet the core remained human: judgment, timing, and the ability to gather the right information from people. There’s a candid honesty in admitting advice isn’t always right, but consistency, context, and clear communication build trust over cycles.

    The people and places are vivid because the work lives at their edges. Helicopter landings on offshore platforms, the roar of blades, and the cold that makes noddy suits into a second skin. Dinner in Los Angeles where a finance director meets Wolfgang Puck. Serendipitous chats with Kiefer Sutherland and Oliver Stone that reveal how to meet famous people without fawning—be yourself, ask better questions, listen well. Keanu Reeves, embodying that quiet, grounded presence everyone hopes the famous still hold. These moments matter not as name-drops but as lessons in social intelligence, poise, and reading the room—skills as valuable as any spreadsheet model.

    Threaded through is a philosophy that blends grit with grace. The “Inches” speech from Any Given Sunday becomes a personal mantra: life is decided in small increments—the six inches in front of your face. Careers and relationships move by inches, not leaps. When facing loss, divorce, or exhaustion, the way forward is immediate, tactical, and present. That outlook pairs with a clear stance on legacy: do right by your child, be good to your friends, and let the records of your kindness be carried by people, not plaques. The seven places to scatter ashes are a map of meaning, not a shrine to achievement.

    It ends where it began: with mentors and movement. Boarding school on a cliff above the sea taught independence and perseverance—the kind that carries across borders and market cycles. Friends distilled into a true-ten test; mentors named with gratitude; and an arc that bends from a £99 suit on day one to a long lunch in Napa with Jerry Jones.

    The advice is simple and hard: seek mentors, ask for the next challenge before you feel qualified, invest in relationships, and fight for the inches you can see. When chance offers a door, walk through.

  • Football, Faith, and Family: A Scottish Tale

    The hotel room is quiet—just two blocked noses and the hum of memory. I’m sitting with Russell, who leans back and begins to unspool a life shaped by football, faith, work, and the stubborn will to choose differently. As he speaks, Central Scotland in the sixties and seventies comes into focus: steelworks, bookies, Friday drinks, and the weekly orbit around Rangers and Celtic.

    The way Russell tells it, the rivalry wasn’t just about a badge—it nested into schools, pubs, bus routes, and family rooms. You were born Catholic or Protestant, sent to a Catholic or Protestant school, then nudged toward Celtic or Rangers. Identity felt given rather than chosen, and yet Russell’s story is about the friction of choosing inside what’s inherited. There’s the boy who answers “Christian” in hospital, not yet fluent in divides; the young centre-half who can’t quite keep his temper under a scout’s gaze; the apprentice who learns manhood by sparks, soot, and the blunt language of hard men on a shop floor.

    He returns to Rangers with pride and a wince, calling it a roller coaster—loyal even when it hurts. But what cuts deeper is the love story that crossed the line many said shouldn’t be crossed. Katie, the youngest of fourteen in a large Catholic family, meets Russell in a red jumper at a community centre disco. They try the secret path at first, waiting for older siblings to test the waters, measuring risk in glances and weekend plans. The reveal happens, the heat comes, and still they move toward a chapel wedding in 1983. A few don’t show. Some grumble. But the vows hold. Decades later, they still go back to Los Cristianos, where a coin toss once chose honeymoon over a flat—and somehow still led to a home. That circular route—impulse to anchor—feels like Russell’s way: act, absorb the cost, and build something lasting out of it.

    Work threads the story in gritty chapters. From selling denim and jackets at Chelsea Boy—learning how people want to look on a Friday—to a trade in the steelworks that was filthy, exacting, and formative. He learned fast, because the men around him spoke in few words and taught in raised eyebrows and hand signals. Redundancy cut the line after four years, and another path opened through doorsteps and ledgers. A collector’s knock became a bridge to Prudential, where his route book and rapport turned into a top-performing agency. It wasn’t luck; it was the slow accrual of trust, the remembered names from mail-order days, and the willingness to stand at a threshold and ask a better question. Sales here isn’t a hustle—it’s continuity: being the same face that comes back, not to sell a dream but to maintain a promise.

    Still, the edge of rivalry sliced into real life. Friends from the steelworks—Celtic men—arranged a bus for a cup final and placed Russell in the wrong end. He looked the part of a threat in Wrangler, stay-press, and Doc Martens. The law against “bandaging a flag” became the trap door. A day in custody, a night almost gone, a long walk home when the buses stop and the clocks spring forward. It’s the kind of story that makes you laugh, then wince, then think about how easy it is to game a system when identities harden into caricatures. There’s no heroic moral, just the bill: sixty pounds and a lesson in who pays when the joke lands.

    The family portrait is softer and more complex. His dad worked at Cummins—steady job, strong pension, and Fridays that drifted into whiskey and trouble. His mum stayed—stubborn in love and covenant, taking the blows that don’t leave marks but leave grooves in a week. Russell grew up with a refuge across the road in his gran’s home—proof that a family has many rooms, and sometimes the safest door is not the front one. Over time, his dad’s drinking eased, as tempers wind down when the years grow heavier. The sense of “we made our bed, we lie in it” comes alive not as resignation but as a disciplined form of hope. It’s an ethic that shaped Russell’s standards: keep your commitments, fix what you can, take a walk to cool a hot head, and apologise with actions more than words.

    There’s another scene that breathes—a minibus to the Clyde Valley Hotel, mods and music that made Sundays feel electric, scraps that warmed up in car parks and cooled down over pool tables. The names fall like postcards—Lanark, the Roundtree, Watty Kyle—and the bus that always looked too tired to make it but somehow did. What remains is a sensory archive: the hiss of gravel pitches, the thud of a Mitre Molemaster, the smell of hot steel and solvent, the press of a chapel aisle, the salt air of Tenerife, and the paper rasp of insurance books signed at kitchen tables. This is working-class culture as living memory, not nostalgia. It shows how rituals—football Saturdays, Friday pay packets, Sunday music—give shape to weeks and to the people who fill them.

    The question that pulls tight at the end is about drink. Russell watched what alcohol did to his father and learned to track his own compass. He calls himself—

  • The Power of Inherited Memory: A Son’s Quest to Know His Father

    Some stories begin not with words, but with silence—an absence that echoes across generations. That’s where my conversation with David Williams begins. David lost his father at the age of seven. While most children have years to build memories, David was left with fragments: beach barbecues on Stanley Beach, bowling club outings, and the foggy recollections of a child too young to grasp the extraordinary man his father was.

    Llewelyn Williams was no ordinary man. Born in 1922, he joined the Local Defence Volunteers (later the Home Guard) at just seventeen, as war erupted across Europe. By nineteen, he was training as a navigator in the Royal Air Force. The selection process was brutally pragmatic—when young Lew expressed interest in becoming a pilot, an officer reportedly told him, “Any bloody fool can drive a bus. It takes brains to get it there and back.” His mathematical aptitude as a trainee accountant made him ideally suited for navigation—a role demanding precision and quick thinking under the most harrowing conditions imaginable.

    The statistics for Bomber Command aircrews were devastating. Of the 105,000 men who served, around 55,000 were killed—a death rate of over 50%. Each mission carried a 5% casualty rate, meaning few survived a full tour of thirty missions. Against these odds, Lew flew with a Halifax bomber crew, primarily targeting strategic locations in France. This may have contributed to his survival, though it couldn’t shield him from the brutal reality of war.

    On 25 June 1944, everything changed. His aircraft was hit by flak returning from a mission over France. As the crew scrambled to evacuate, Lew reached the escape hatch—just before the plane was hit again. He bailed out, the sole survivor of his seven-man crew. What followed was an extraordinary tale of courage and resilience. Injured but alive, he found shelter with members of the French Resistance. But their safehouse in Paris was raided by the Gestapo, and Lew was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp alongside his protectors.

    In a remarkable twist of fate, a Luftwaffe officer discovered Allied airmen being held illegally in the camp. This led to Lew’s transfer to Stalag Luft III—the very site of the famous “Great Escape.” As the war neared its end and the Red Army advanced, prisoners were marched to another camp before finally being liberated. Tragically, the chemicals used to delouse prisoners at Buchenwald would later cause the cancer that took Lew’s life in 1963, when David was just seven.

    What struck me most in speaking with David was how these memories weren’t his own—they were inherited, passed down through stories told by his grandmother Floss, his mother, and his father’s RAF friend Alan. These second-hand memories became the foundation of David’s understanding of the father he barely knew.

    Thankfully, David’s mother remarried a kind and loving man nicknamed “Binks”, who became a devoted stepfather and helped create what David calls “a very privileged upbringing… because there was a lot of love going around.”

    When I asked David what he would say to his father if he could speak to him today, his answer was quietly profound:

    “I’d probably like to say to him, I’m really sorry that you were only with my mother for about basically 14 years, but if it gives you any comfort, I’ve been with the same woman for 50 and I’m very happy.”

    In that simple statement, we hear how the values of commitment and family have transcended generations—even when direct contact was cut short. Though David lost his father young, the legacy of who Llewelyn Williams was continues to shape his son’s life to this day.