From the Introduction to the Journal: 'Already having the sense of being an 'outsider', on entering the Art School I felt an immediate kinship with the other students and my life changed irrevocably. It was here that I met the painter, Derek Boshier, who at eighteen had just been accepted at the Royal College of Art... ...Amongst the rubbish littering the cupboards of the Art School I found an old, discarded ledger and felt compelled to write in it. Thus began the Journal, the original handwritten version eventually filling seven notebooks. It provides merely a glimpse of one particular young person's life, who, like many thousands more, felt uncertain and alienated, living with not only the threat but, as it seemed at the time, the imminent possibility of a nuclear war. The first section of the Journal covers a period of two years spent at Somerset College of Art, in Taunton, where the painting tutor was Terry Murphy. He had been a contemporary of Peter Blake and Leon Kossoff at the Royal College of Art, at a time when Frank Auerbach, Bridget Riley and John Bratby were also studying there and John Minton was working as a part-time painting tutor. Through Terry Murphy I learned much about life at the RCA in the mid-Fifties, little knowing that I would subsequently become involved with many of its students. The second section of the Journal covers the time when, having graduated from Somerset College of Art, I moved to London, working for a while as a chambermaid in an hotel in Cromwell Road, West London, and frequenting the celebrated Troubadour coffee - bar and the gay pub. the Coleherne, at night. Then to Birmingham on the Art Teachers' Course for a postgraduate degree, where I lived in the notorious Varna Road, Balsall Heath, then a red-light district where cock-fights were regularly held in the streets after dark. Finally, the third section, the longed-for return to London. The year was 1961, the beginning of an extraordinary era, one of escalating protest - anti-nuclear weapons, anti-apartheid, anti-capital punishment - a time when old-fashioned attitudes were at least beginning to change, marking the emergence of a society that at least acknowledges the long overdue need to embrace the gay community, stamp out racism and further augment equality of the sexes. At the same time there was a great surge of innovative creative energy emanating from the art schools in the wake of artists like Peter Blake, Joe Tilson and Bridget Riley: people like David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty, Zandra Rhodes, Sally Tuffin, Marion Foale, Ossie Clark, Celia Birtwell, Bobi Bartlett and Janice Wainwright - linking Pop Artists, fashion designers and pop musicians and contributing to the emergence of a definable youth culture, epitomised by the vibrant, defiant optimism and excitement of the Sixties. The Journal ends in 1963, the year when the winter was so harsh that London froze for weeks on end and President John F Kennedy was assassinated. Naturally, reading the Journal again after so many years, I longed to makes changes, extend the vocabulary and improve the style but I have resisted the temptation. It remains, as it was written, with all the arrogance, inconsistency, false assumption and rotten syntax of an eighteen year old at odds with the world. Whether it has any validity is a matter for the reader. Besides the desire to record aspects of social history, diarists' compulsion to 'talk to themselves' is essential to their sanity, performing perhaps a function whereby they can decipher and assimilate the constant barrage of ideas and feelings with which they are bombarded, especially in late adolescence. And if one is feeling alienated or isolated there is, undoubtedly, a profound comfort in reading the thoughts of others who have felt the same way. At such times, through reading their journals and letters, I have felt a great affinity with the Russian painter, Marie Bashkirtseff, the naturalist and essayist, Barbellion, the painter, Carrington, and many others and I should, in turn, like to think that another struggling soul might find some solace in mine.'