Ready, get set…

All I know about this post is that I am going to introduce myself and lay down what I might write about.
My name is David Pearson. I was born in Dudley, in the West Midlands (formerly the glorious county of Worcestershire) at a time when the streets could be smog-bound and the canals were slicked with oil and choked with all manner of industrial and domestic debris, including unwanted pets. This was not long after WWII. 1950, to be precise. On the birth-date of Thomas Hardy, to be even more precise.
I wandered the streets of Dudley and Birmingham until I was eighteen, then travelled further afield to Europe and Asia. In 1973, my wife and I moved to Jersey, Channel Islands, where I wrote and painted, intending to write or paint as a career. Instead, I became a non-qualified teacher with three children. From there, we decided on Somerset, where I became a (now-qualified) teacher of English, Drama, Art and French, writing in my ‘spare’ time and amassing hundreds of pages of poetry, prose and jottings, most of which I didn’t have the confidence to send out for publication. I also **** Buddhism. (I need to insert a word or phrase here that suggests I took a keen interest in/was absorbed by Buddhism, but that I didn’t formally commit to ‘being a Buddhist’). That personal involvement has not diminished, though the Sangha (Buddhist community) aspect has always felt a bit tricky. More on that in my ‘Buddhist Musings’.
The time to retire from full-time teaching arrived after I fell down the school steps and shattered. Although I continued with Somerset County Council, I worked in a centre comprising small groups and individuals for whom school was no longer an option. I also became part of the Virtual Classroom, communicating through the internet with those who could not even face going to the centre. Some of them were unable to leave their bedrooms or talk to their own parents, but these very ones did, in many cases, achieve qualifications in the ‘core’ (or their own choice of) subjects via the wonderful Virtual classroom platform.
Once I had become a full-time retiree, I was able to finish a novel that I had been working on when I could. Again, more about that elsewhere. And to tackle a trek across the Pyrenees. There are things to say about that, too.
But that’s more than enough for the moment. I shall try and ‘blog’ quite regularly: it’s a case of getting into the habit. I shall, as all good bloggers do, discuss what I have read and seen; link to, and recommend others’ blogs, books, poems, exhibitions, activities, organisations; issue the occasional left-wing pinko liberal diatribe against political and institutional stupidity (plenty to mention there) and neo-fascism and white supremacy and sexism, ageism, youngism, tongueism, even, when necessary (eg the treatment by some harm-no-living-creatures-and-work-for-the-welfare-of-all-sentient-beings Burmese Buddhist priests of the Rohinga people is beyond despicable) Buddhism. Bye for now.