Big Wheels Keep On Turning

The 1980s were a difficult years for me in some ways. Over the course of decade, I was gradually losing my hearing, and gradually learning to live with the knowledge that it would not be returning. In some ways it was like going into a personal lockdown. At the time we were living in Sheffield and I was finding work difficult to cope with – teaching needs to be an interactive experience if it is going to be rewarding. I used to find some kind of solace in visiting Grimsby and Cleethorpes – although I can’t, for the life of me, tell you why – and there I would take photographs of abandoned fish docks and deserted seaside attractions. This is one of my photographs from that time of the “big” wheel in Cleethorpes.

By the end of the decade, things were improving. My son was born in 1989 – one of the great joys of my life. I started to write more and teach less. We moved back to West Yorkshire – a process of coming home. And, by the end of the 1990s, I had been fitted with a cochlear implant, and I re-entered the world of sound and (limited) hearing. Big wheels keep on turning.