I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere - 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go.

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.