I was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, brought up in Blackpool, Lancashire. I am both white and red roses. At primary school my teacher said to me, it’s not buk, cuk, luk it’s (oo as in who) book, cook, look. I said my parents said the former and that was good enough for me. Neither was standard received pronunciation, as I found out at Oxford, reading mathematics. In those first few uncomfortable days at university, the laconic drawls of others made me impatient for them to get on with what they were saying. For their part, they simply could not understand the fast speech of flat vowel sounds and glottal stops instead of consonants that was my accent. I slowed down, somewhat, they speeded up a little and by the third year I had friends with posh accents.
At Oxford, I read a book in the Paladin paperback series by Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind that changed my way of being and seeing the world. I exchanged the certainty of right answers for a life-long interest in process that led to, initially, a career in teaching mathematics to secondary age children. After 14 years, I began an association with the University of Bristol that led to my appointment as a full-time academic mathematics educator, working primarily with people who were becoming mathematics teachers. Writing with Jane Speedy and others in the Bristol Collaborative Writing Group (BCWG) was a joy.
At school I had wanted to study Mathematics, Further Mathematics and English at A-level but English had always been against Further Mathematics on the options timetable and the school were not going to change that. My English teacher said to me that if I was going to be a mathematician then at least be a literate one. I knew I would always read widely but would not do mathematics without a structure at that point so did, indeed, choose mathematics. Being a literate mathematician, with an interest in narrative led to editing, collaboratively, international journals and books related to storytelling.
I am now retired, although retaining my connections with the University of Bristol, School of Education through writing with colleagues. Having taught many international groups with Asian students, I once asked a small group how they would think of “wisdom” in their own languages. They giggled and said they would need to go away and think about it. When they came back a couple of days later, they had a wooden frame with two characters drawn on a piece of parchment inside, one above the other. “The top character means something like “shining of the sun” and the bottom one is “seeing clearly””, they said, “it’s the nearest we could get”. At that stage I made an intention to learn Sanskrit, a process language, when I retired. I am currently chanting verses of the Gita with my teacher. We choose the verse having had a conversation after reading a chapter of My Gita by Devdutt Pattanaik (2015). Each chapter is a thematic discussion across the whole of the Gita, such as “you and I do not judge”, rather than reading verse by verse.