Bio

Who am I? What am I? Where am I from? Where have I been? what did I do? Not an original way of starting to look at things but at my age little is.

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I am a retired married dyslexic experimental nuclear physicist and airborne sensor electronic engineer and now I want to write poetry and sketch buildings. I am very grateful that I find that I have a gorgeous, lovely, generous family, and my son and my daughter have five gorgeous grand children between them.

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I was born John Andrew Campbell Beattie in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire in 1943. I lived, studied and worked in Farnborough, Hampshire from 1963 to 1986 I got married to Fran Pennington in 1967 in Cheltenham. We lived in Bishop's Cleeve, near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire from 1986 to 2008, from where I worked in Malvern until 2008. We have lived on the Isle of Wight since 2017

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In Bishop's Cleeve I was chair of the Village Hall committee that managed the village hall, which was in a 14th century tithe barn. We succeeded in raising the funds needed to repair and extend it and bring it into the 21st century.  I also was part of SWARD (Safety in Waste and Rubbish Disposal) which was able to achieve, under its chair Barbara Farmer, significant improvements to the local land fill and toxic waste disposal in the UK.

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During my career as a Government Scientist. I gained an MSc in Experimental Nuclear Physics, became a member of the Institute of Physics and accepted as a Chartered Physicist . In Cheltenham I was a volunteer at the Wilson Museum and Art Gallery, now I volunteer at the Classic Boat Museum in East Cowes, the Wight Aviation Museum on Sandown Airport, and the Isle of Wight Literary Festival at Northwood House Cowes every October.

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I have not been writing poetry for long. Starting in Bishop's Cleeve in the early 2000's, where I attended a weekly course run by Anna Saunders, to whom I would like to offer my grateful thanks for getting me going. Her course was encouraging and critical and enjoyable and attracted people from all over the county. She later went on to head up the superb Cheltenham Poetry Festival, which runs very successfully alongside the Cheltenham's Literature, Music, Science, Jazz, and Folk festivals.

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I have included with my poems some of my sketches for which I want to thank my Fran, an amazing botanical artist herself, who encouraged me, and I also want to thank Sue Willis, Fran's fellow art teacher at Pittville School, for giving us drawing classes in her home in Churchdown, where she applied her teacher’s lack of exasperation and her artistic skills to an appreciative group. However, this is my work, I can’t blame anyone else for it.

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I have also included photos of some of the 'Objet Trouve' sculptures that I made during lockdown and exhibited at Monkton Arts in Ryde.

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