Reminiscences – The young Carer has discovered a piece of paper that says I am a year older than they thought I was. Merde!! I shall now be on a par with the old Carer’s life expectancy, so we should start to think about our ‘legacy’. She doesn’t much like reminiscing but, snuggled up in the duvet, I can usually wheedle out some info. Well, she began, in 1979, when she arrived in this street the terrace houses were all but derelict and scheduled for demolition to cut a new road joining Camberwell New Road to the Walworth Road. The Council was housing so-called ‘problem’ families and also rented some properties to the artists’ housing association Acme as temporary studios, and the artist Duncan Newton had put the old Carer down as co-occupier of this house. She was the third artist in this house, and there were at least six other artists’ houses in the street. Next door was the Russian exile Oleg Kudryashov, who was eventually allowed back to St Petersburg after the fall of the Soviet Union. Other artists moved away and, alas, Jessica Wilkes two doors down, passed away, leaving us as the only artists’ house. As it turned out, the Council demolished the prefabs opposite and the tenements abutting our garden but couldn’t afford the road project, so our terrace was reprieved and the site behind reverted to being a park as it was in the Victorian era (actually a ‘zoological garden’ – and I shudder to think what that meant for the animal inmates…). At this point Thatcher’s government forced the Council to say, buy or leave, so, having nowhere else to go, the old Carer said she would buy, and so began the long saga of multiple teaching jobs and writing assignments to pay for mortgage and repairs. She relates how in the studio she had plastic funnels and buckets to catch the water coming from the roof, and how the water in the buckets often froze in the winter. But that one summer evening the entire ceiling was covered in a surreal display of moths. She recounts also that at the corner of the street there was a Buddleia that was festooned with butterflies. Forty years on, such nature miracles are inconceivable…