Between Two Worlds?

As a child I loved to shock others with the tale that I had been abandoned at birth by gypsies and raised en famille with kindly mice in the crypt of an old church.

Alas! The truth is altogether more unremarkable!

For I was born and raised in the ancient City of York – a Yorky who lives by the ethos that a book, a decent cup of tea and a bar of chocolate can ALWAYS make the world a better place.

A dreamer from birth with a taste for history and the irresistible urge to create – by day you can usually find me along with my battered tool box inside my atelier creating away with the radio blaring out and surrounded by shelves of weird creatures, baskets of fabric, tubs of paints, the odd pot of glue, stacks of paper and piles of exotic woods .

However, and as the sun falls on another day and with the messy apron discarded – I will go in search of the dead.

For if I’m NOT musing upon the discovery of a mysterious bundle of long-forgotten ephemera, poring over the details of a tatty burial record or recording an exciting discovery of an elusive ancestor in an old notebook – I will be researching the poignant stories of long forgotten folk for my company The Polite Tourist which offers true crime walks through Victorian history in York, Scarboro’ and beyond.

I have been asked on more than one occasion how I can move between two very different worlds – one which indulges my passion for creating all things miniature and the other in which I can be found wandering through cemeteries in a quest to wake the dead.

For me, it’s not a question of ‘why’ but rather ‘why not?’