Family & Community
I live in East Oxford. The residents’ association, DRARA (Divinity Road Area Residents’ Association) is very active and I am was elected as Secretary at the AGM in October 2011.
It is linked to Low Carbon East Oxford through whom I had 1.7kW of solar panels installed on my south-west facing roof in November 2010. You can see the Climate XChange case study here. Having just completed the first year of operation it looks as if it is generating about 28% of my electricity. I hope to increase the % by reducing my consumption, in 2012.
I belong to a local car club, Commonwheels, a Community Interest Company (CIC), an idea whose time has finally come.
I was a parent governor at Cheney School until 2009 where my daughters Nadine and Alice went to school. Alice was working there as a teaching assistant and being a coach for the debating club in her ‘gap year’ in 2010.
She is now studying Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and has just been elected Women’s officer for the LSE SU for 2012/13. She won the Crawford Prize for the best result in Political Science in year 1 and is acting as a debating coach with ‘DebateMate’, working in a secondary school in north London. She is also President of the LSE Feminist Society.
Nadine graduated from University College London with a first class degree in English Literature and moved to Glasgow University to study for an M. Litt in Medieval Scottish Studies in the autumn of 2010. She has spent some time on one of the smaller islands in the Outer Hebrides learning Gaelic and writing and is now living in Glasgow’s ‘East End’.
My youngest sister Claudia is a ceramicist. ‘The Pot Book’ which she co-authored with Edmund de Waal was published by Phiadon in October 2011. It was well reviewed by Marina Vaizey in the V&A mag recently. You can catch up on that and her current and recent exhibitions at her website.
The other artist in my immediate family was my dad’s cousin, Frank Martin (1921-2005). The family has just launched a website about his life and a number of his works are for sale through the site.