A lucky Life

How I can help

If you are involved with a charity who needs a web site I can construct a web site for you at a cost of as little as £5. The web site you are currently looking at costs me £5 per year. This is the third site I have built while I am by no means an expert I might have enough knowledge to help your charity get online. If you’d like to know more send an email to info@locallives.uk.

How can you help

You can help by putting me in touch with some of the heroes of the neighbourhood who by their job or by volunteering make a big difference to the community. All you have to do is drop me a line at info@locallives and I will follow it up and see if we can tell their story which may inspire others.

A short version of my story

I was born in the early fifties to parents who enjoyed going out and having fun. Neither of them had a formal education. My father left school at 14 and my mother experienced multiple schools as her parents moved around the country in a state of marital discord.

We moved to London when I reached 7 with my father kin order to accommodate my father who by now worked in the music business. I grew up in the sixties at a time of experimentation with music and cannabis. This combination did little for my education and I failed my A levels. I hated this moment in my life and determined never to fail again. My only hope of acquiring a degree came when I applied to Nottingham College of Education and four years later was awarded a B.Ed. I thought at the time that I would like to be a lecturer and went on to do a Master’s at Essex University.

I married at the tender age of 24 and my wife and I set up our first home in Birmingham where we both taught in a secondary school for a year. IK had no thought that I would remain as a teacher and at the end of the year started a Phd at Warwick University, still hoping to lecture. We lived in Leamington Spa. I soon realised that my writing skills would never make me a successful lecturer so we moved to London.

Career

I managed to obtain a job as a sales rep for a small record company and then took up a role as a music publisher. I steadily moved up in different positions and eventually ran the publishing arm for the management company of Duran Duran. When the managers lost control of Duran I was made redundant as they no longer had the money to pay my wages. At 35 I decided to leave the music industry and look for another adventure. After 9 months I started again as a salesman for a printing machine manufacturer. Again I moved up the hierarchy in the company, but then a new MD arrived and we just didn’t get on.

My own business

I decided that it was now or never to start my own business with the help of my wife. We started working from home selling typesetting machines and supplies. We worked through this rocky opening times until we managed to borrow enough money from the bank to move into our first offices. It still wasn’t plain sailing but we managed to cope. The business started to change with evolving technology and we moved from selling equipment to printers to becoming a software house. We still marketed our wares to printers as we provided software that controlled colour to international standards for industrial printers.

In 2017 we sold the company to an international conglomerate and they asked me to stay on for another couple of years and I finally left the business in 2019. I am glad to say our company still has virtually the same staff and is still going strong.

The family

Despite working together with all its ups and downs I am still happily married with two great kids and six grandchildren. Unfortunately they don’t live near us so we see less of them than we would like.

How Lucky?

While I have had times when I have been despondent on the whole life has treated me well. I realise that I have not given as much back to my community as I could have, apart from treating the people who worked for us well. To make up for this I now see my late mother’s boyfriend who is 100 and still drives. Now I have started this web site to highlight those who give more to the community than I have ever done.