Effect of the past on the now

When I was a boy, I lived in a poor Irish community in London.

I had become an immigrant at the age of four, and this gave me wisdom, or a sense of the world outside my family, and that is unusual for a child. I have a photograph of myself as a very small child, and the expression on my face is pensive, uneasy, as if I was looking out at something felt but not yet seen.

My first school was a Catholic convent institution, where the nuns were eccentric but loving, and utterly convinced of their place in a transitional world that would lead to heaven. Thus, I was convinced and secure, and preoccupied with the beauty and the spiritual layering of my world and its creation.