Once upon a time, a very long while ago, half a decade after the end of the last world war, in a time of teddy boys and winklepickers, a little boy was born in Shoeburyness, a village in the far east of England. The village was situated at the very widest part of the estuary, where Old Father Thames meets the great North Sea. The boy's great - grandfather and his daughter, the boy's grandmother, worked a Thames barge, sailing up and down the river with their cargo of coal. When the boy's grandmother grew too old to sail the barge she would sit with the boy and tell him stories, tales in which fantasy and reality merged. The boy loved these stories and drew pictures of the things of which his grandmother told.

And so, it was only to be expected that when the boy left school he thought that he would be able to spend all of his days painting and he went to art school. However, before very long the boy's much loved father died, and as the first born child the boy was expected to take on the role of provider for his family. Now as we all know, there is no money to be made from art, and the barge was long gone, so the boy's mother decided to apprentice him to a boat builder, and from then on the boy worked long and hard in a proper job with no time for the frivolities of his past carefree life.

In due course, the boy, now a man, married and had two daughters of his own, and at bedtimes he would pass on the now much embroidered stories of his grandmother's life, but still he did not pick up the tools of his youth, his paintbrushes, and paint for them the pictures which once delighted him. Not, that is, until he came to live in the far west of the country, to the place at the very end of England, where the never ending sea meets the sky, and the granite cottages are huddled into the tiny alleyways around the safe haven of the harbours.

Now the man spends long days and nights painting his pictures, often finding himself drifting back to his childhood, to the time of storytelling, painting his pictures in which fantasy and reality merge once more - stirring the imagination of all who look upon them, and the man truly feels he has died and gone to heaven. A proper job indeed!