Philip

My son, Philip, was born at the old West London Hospital on 20th August 1979. At that time Angie and I were living in a flat in Holland Road, Kensington, having returned from Japan some months earlier. In November that year I took up a post as English Language Instructor in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and in the middle of January 1980, Angie and Philip joined me in our top-floor apartment in a seven-storey block in Saudia City.

In 1984 Philip started at the Parents’ Cooperative School (PCS), and then when we moved to the Dhahran area of the Eastern Province in 1986 he joined the British-Dutch School in Al-Khobar, which a year later merged with the American Dhahran Academy at the American consulate in Dhahran.

In 1988 Angie, Philip and Julia moved back to the UK to live in our house in Clifton Hill, Brighton, and Philip and Julia started to attend Brighton Steiner School, at that time housed in two detached residential houses in the Ditchling Road. I moved back to join the family at the end of January 1989.

Plans for a Steiner secondary ‘Technology Academy’ fell through, and so Philip moved to Blatchington Mill comprehensive school, in Hove, where he remained from 1990 to 1995, when he took his GCSEs. He went on from there to BHASVIC 6th form college and later Brighton City College.

Since 1998 Philip has had a number of jobs, and has developed his considerable skills as an artist, sculptor, pianist and singer. In 2011, during the Brighton Festival, he had two exhibitions of his sculptures, and his work was much praised. Philip now lives in a flat in Moulsecoomb. He has a blog where you can see pictures of some of his sculpture and paintings and much else.