Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.
I have been lucky enough to travel around the world all my life. As I said in yesterday’s post, my parents worked abroad from the time I was 6 months old to the time I was 5 years old. On our way back to the UK, which was by ship, we spent two weeks in Australia. I remember those two weeks very clearly, more clearly than anything else on that amazing journey to the UK.
The memories are somewhat episodic, as you would expect given my age. However, I can remember that we docked at Perth and stayed in a hotel. The first thing that I remember is coming down to the TV room along with a number of other children to watch the cartoon version of The Fantastic Four! I have never seen it before or since, though I would love to, but I still remember my reaction to it very well. I was gripped by a completely different style of programme and I wasn’t alone when watching it, so there was a kind of shared excitement. Outside of the hotel I remember feeding the black swans in a park in Perth. I had never seen anything like them before and they were fascinating to me, as every swan I’d seen in the stories was white. Finally, I remember going to a beach in a place called Broome where the sand on the beaches was red. For years I had a seashell from that beach with the red sand clinging to it as a reminder, but that got lost in one of my moves.
This early experience ignited my passion for the country and gave me a lifelong yearning to return. I have returned three times so far and on one of those occasions I took a Masters Degree at the University of Wollongong. Like my Dad, I got offered a job there, and like my Dad I had to turn it down. I still have a feeling, however, that my time with Australia is not done.
What does your ideal home look like?
I have never really had much connection to bricks and mortar. Perhaps it was inevitable from very young. My parents lived in India, Pakistan and Singapore during my first five years. When they moved back to the UK we had four different addresses in the first four years we were back and by the time we settled down, relatively speaking, in the house I spent the rest of my childhood and teens in, a house was just a place to live.
Whenever I tried to think of my perfect house, and I suppose I must have done, it always had other children in it. I was an only child and I wanted a sister when I was younger because I always enjoyed the company of girls more than boys because they were happy to talk and they were nicer. However, I always preferred the company of the confident outgoing and adventurous girls because they were the qualities I felt that I lacked myself.
The outside of the house, and to some extent the inside never mattered, just the inhabitants. I am still bored by the house buying or renovating shows I see on television because as long as it is watertight and possible to heat during the winter, anything else is irrelevant to me. The concept that always baffles me in these shows is ‘kerb appeal’! Why on earth does it matter? You are inside the house so you don’t see it from outside most of the time. It’s not remotely important to me and no one has explained to me persuasively why it should be.
I admit that since we bought our current home outright – and notice I used the word home there – I have given more thought to the concept, but it is all about the family unit we have of myself, my wife and my daughter, and the visits from the other children. It is only a home because of the family. If I have a dream house now it would perhaps be in Australia, but that has been the case for 30 years! As usual, the bricks and mortar don’t matter so I don’t care what it looks like as long as it is sturdy.
What brings a tear of joy to your eye?
I always feel that men have been behind the 8 ball from the start when it comes to emotional reaction. If you got past the age of about 10, at least when I was growing up, any indication that you were affected by something to the point of tears would have you labelled a ‘cissy’ or worse. The message came through loud and clear from society at large, and to some extent still does, that ‘real men don’t cry’ and that ‘you need to man up’. The latter makes me shake my head especially when I look at Men’s football, with the players screaming in agony, rolling around and punching the ground when they are tackled, and compare it to Women’s football where they hardly ever resort to that play acting (well apart from Italy and Spain in the Euros) and have to be really hurt to stay down. I would say that men need to ‘woman up’!
For all the reasons that I haven’t got time to go into here, the idea of tears of joy, which unfortunately (in a number of ways) have come easily to me, have always had to be hidden where possible. As I have got older the requirement to do so has seemed less important so I find myself able to express these feelings more openly, although not publicly. (As an aside I have never understood why it is supposed to be good to express emotions through swearing and threatening behaviour, but apparently that’s the behaviour of ‘real men’!)
When my children achieve goals or act in a selfless or beautiful way it will bring a tear to my eye. For example when my daughter plays football and does something that is really special that can set me off. Next weekend she is playing in the Preliminary Round of the Women’s F A Cup and I know that even when she walks out there will be tears in my eyes. I have followed her football journey since she was 9 years old and I never expected to see her play even at an early stage of the best competition in the game.
When I watched the Lionesses win the Euros in 2022 and 2025 I definitely ‘had something in my eye’! By the way, only men will ever use that phrase, because they want to minimise their displays of emotion.
When I am at a concert that gives me pure joy I can definitely feel like I ‘have been chopping onions’, another nonsensical male excuse for expressing the full range of emotions. It’s usually when the person or people I am with show complete joy that I find that happening, although it can happen on my own account.
Great music, enjoyable books, family films and spectacular shows can all give me that rush of emotion. In each category I give you, Vltava by Smetana, A Christmas Carol, Inside Out and Willy Wonka, Evita and The Nutcracker. Also certain TV shows can ‘catch me out’ like Home and Away. Meeting Julie Dawn Cole left me with a similar feeling.
Christmas can bring me that type of reaction when we are all together as a family and we are just enjoying opening our presents or playing games or sharing a meal. That tends to be when ‘it’s a bit dusty in here’.
So there you have it. Lots of triggers but lots of excuses. That is the lot of the male through the ages. I remember when I was a child watching girls talk to each other, cry and comfort each other and express emotions far more naturally and I always wished I had been a girl because I found that so much more natural. I still do and that’s why I naturally gravitate towards women’s sport with it’s more positive and natural displays of emotion from the gender that does it better.
Why do you blog?
When I first started blogging in 2011, I did so because I wanted to tell people about my first novel which I put on Kindle. After just 6 posts I realised that I was getting no traction so I gave up.
10 years later I decided to restart it as a way of expanding upon my music reviewing. On Twitter I was limited to 280 characters a tweet and on Rockposer.com and Subba Cultcha I was reviewing for other websites with their own readership and guidelines. I loved doing that and still do, but I wanted a bit more freedom. Accordingly, I started to review my own albums, recount my musical history and go through my Singles collection from A to Z.
Within a year I realised that I wanted to branch out to books, theatre and films so I decided to make it a general review site. All of my reviews had a personal element and I felt comfortable reflecting on myself and my experiences in a safer environment. This made me realise that I needed to expand still further.
The next incarnation of my blog was where I focused much more on personal experiences by using the media or the events, often as the background, to expand on ideas, feelings and opinions. I started to take part in Blogmas, 24 days of posts from the First of December, and found the balance, I like to think, between the personal and the media or event.
So, where are we now? Well, essentially, I am looking forward to the new phase of life that I have in front of me. I am full of ideas for the direction this blog will take and answering the daily prompt is a big part of that. I now want to expand my blog, increase the number of views and improve the quality of my writing still further. This blog will form one of the cornerstones of my life from now on, and I can’t wait to see what it brings.
So there you have it. My reasons for blogging are ever changing. As a final thought, I would love to get more comments underneath the posts and I hope that my future writing will justify that extra interaction.
Thank you to everyone who has read even one of my posts. You are very much appreciated.
Interview someone — a friend, another blogger, your mother, the mailman — and write a post based on their responses.
Well, today is the day after the end of my Pre-Sessional teaching and I have been thinking about AI a lot! So I decided to interview ChatGPT and ask it how best to prevent my students misusing it. Here’s the highlights.
What are the best ways for students to use CHATGPT to help write an academic essay in the art and design field?
ChatGPT said:
Great question! Students in art and design can use ChatGPT as a supportive tool for academic essay writing — not to replace their own thinking, but to help research, structure, and refine their work. Here are some of the best ways to use it effectively:
Research and Idea Generation
- Brainstorming topics: Ask ChatGPT to suggest possible essay questions or angles within art and design (e.g., “How does Bauhaus influence contemporary graphic design?”).
- Contextual overviews: Use it to get quick summaries of movements, artists, theories, or design principles before diving into academic sources.
- Comparisons: Prompt it to outline differences or connections between two artists, movements, or approaches.
⚠️ Tip: Always follow up with peer-reviewed sources (journals, books, exhibition catalogs). ChatGPT gives you a starting point, not the final word.
✅ Example Workflow for Students:
- Brainstorm topic ideas with ChatGPT.
- Draft an outline with headings and subpoints.
- Collect and read academic sources.
- Write a rough draft in your own words.
- Use ChatGPT for refining thesis, polishing language, and checking flow.
- Add final critical insights, citations, and formatting.
What is the best way for students to avoid just copying your ideas?
ChatGPT said:
That’s such an important question — and it’s great you’re encouraging your students to think critically about how they use AI tools. Here are some practical strategies students can follow to avoid simply copying ChatGPT’s ideas and instead use it to develop their own voice and arguments:
🔑 1. Treat ChatGPT as a “thinking partner,” not a source
- Use it for brainstorming (e.g., “What themes are common in Bauhaus graphic design?”), but then decide which ideas matter for your essay.
- Don’t copy outputs directly — instead, rewrite them in your own words and test them against your research.
📚 2. Always go back to primary and academic sources
- Take any outline or claim from ChatGPT and verify it in books, journal articles, or exhibition catalogs.
- For example: if ChatGPT says “John Berger argued that images reinforce power structures,” the student should look it up in Ways of Seeing and use a direct quotation.
✍️ 3. Use ChatGPT to question, not to answer
Instead of asking for “an essay,” students can ask:
- “What are three different perspectives on surrealism and politics I could research?”
- “What kinds of evidence would strengthen a thesis about Bauhaus influence today?”
This shifts ChatGPT’s role to scaffolding independent research.
🛠️ 4. Rewrite + Reflect
- After getting suggestions, students should summarize them in their own words without looking at the screen.
- They can then add personal insights — linking ideas to their coursework, studio practice, or artworks they’ve studied.
🧭 5. Keep a “research log”
- Students should note how they used ChatGPT:
- “I asked ChatGPT for examples of feminist art historians; it suggested Linda Nochlin. I looked up her essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? and used a quotation.”
- This creates transparency and shows that AI was a step in the process, not the final product.
It was a really useful interview and I will definitely use the full version when putting my next set of lessons together.
Used correctly, then, AI can be the solution not the problem.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 