In the first half of the last century (September 1947 to be exact) I enrolled as a student at the Glasgow School of Art to study lithography with a view to becoming a layout artist in an advertising agency. However, theatre in the form of a local drama club interrupted and I was diverted from a career in fine arts.   This dramatic diversion . . .

This dramatic diversion lasted for more than 50 years so that it was two marriages, five children and an immigration later that I took up the paintbrush again. To my amazement the old relish was still there and the diversion I know now is the writing of books and the selling of same at performances and this keeps me away from the new passion of my dotage, painting. Art lovers will know of a Augustus John, the Victorian master, and of grandma Moses that latter-day black American primitive – well I suppose you might call me, in the painterly sense, granddad John.