Roger Noble

Righter and righteous
 

I have few memories of my childhood before the age of 6. If the Psychological Theorists are correct and much of our personality is laid down in those earliest of days, then I have no idea of what my being is based upon.

But if you want more. then read on...

Many years ago I haunted the inky pages of Sunday papers nakedly exhorting mothers to use Lifeguard soap but I have since withdrawn from such public endorsements.

I spent the formative years of my twenties living on a kibbutz in Galilee. That's where I really started writing - though I thought of it as a quirk.

Later, in Jerusalem, I studied Psychology, and worked in a Language School - in what was, then, a very mixed city. I met many different people. Writing then was like assembling a cast of characters.

Back in England in my thirties, I trained as a clinical psychologist, I got married and grew a couple of artists and scientists - and remembered the good old days. Writing was an avoidance activity.

In Brighton, working with people with Learning Disabilities, writing was a way of expressing my anger at the System.

When I wrote a D.Phil thesis on Logic Programming, writing was a displacement activity.

Dragged back into Clinical Psychology, in an increasingly chaotic and shrinking NHS, I began to realise that I was actually a writer.

So now that's what I do, when I'm not discovering the riches of radical yiddish writings and posting obscurely captioned photos on social media.