I spent my childhood in St Albans, Hertfordshire, latterly as a student at St Albans Grammar School for Boys. I left in 1978 to study English Literature at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich.
Immediately afterwards I trained to teach English in secondary schools, but ended up a civil servant in England’s Department for Education, formulating various elements of national education policy.
The second half of my civil service career was largely devoted to creating and embedding a coherent national policy for the education of our most able learners. While we had one, I led England’s Gifted and Talented Education Unit.
In 2010 I took early retirement, switching to a heady mix of house-husbandry, freelance writing and consultancy. I specialised in high attainment, fair access and gifted education.
I operated partly through a social media alter ego – Gifted Phoenix – who blogged and tweeted on these issues, as well as wider aspects of national education policy. His old posts are now museum pieces but still accessible.
When Gifted Phoenix returned to the ashes, I planned to retire from education. My swansong was an independent review of effective practice in widening participation and fair access, commissioned by the University of Oxford.
I finally left education behind when my wife Kate died from breast cancer in Summer 2017, aged just 56. The experience of caring for her and then watching her die has changed me almost beyond recognition.
I was just about coping when my father’s death, a year later, gave me too much grief to handle. I suffered a debilitating mental health breakdown.
Since then I have rebuilt my life, with the assistance of my delightful partner and walking companion, Tracy. The posts I write reflect my priorities in this ‘second life’ and are organised under the following headings:
Dracup family history. Like other Dracups, I’ve curated a family tree, but I wanted to develop those bare facts into richer life stories, placing individuals in the socio-historical context in which they lived. To date, I have published 31 posts in this series. Each post is historically and genealogically accurate: I strive to present each ancestor ‘warts and all’, without being judgmental.
UK Walking. Tracy and I have built our relationship through walking together in the British countryside. I recount here our steady progress along the South West Coast Path, the Thames Path, the North Downs and South Downs Ways. We have now completed the South West Coast Path and the North Downs Way. These posts are grouped under the names of the relevant trails.
Holidays is self-explanatory. The majority are walking holidays, but all are grouped in the same category.
Book reviews is a rapidly expanding category. These short-form posts chart ‘the road less travelled’ in English literature, by which I mean literature written in, or translated into, English, during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. (It’s ‘the road less travelled’ because I’ve already worked my way through the vast majority of canonical works.) I buy nearly all my books from charity shops like Oxfam – and hope they’ll return to Oxfam when I go.
Music: During 2025 I completed a series of twelve monthly posts about pieces of music that are important to me. They’re called ‘Ouroboros’ – the snake with its tail in its mouth – because each selection is linked to its predecessor in some way, and the series ends where it began.
Kate and bereavement is also self-explanatory.
Photography applies to all the pictures I take and then publish without accompanying words.
Everything else is now grouped into sub-categories in my Archive, which includes: my last forays into education policy, written between 2015 and 2018; two posts by my incredibly talented brother Mike, who can make pretty much anything but has specialised in building musical instruments, largely from recycled materials; a handful of poetry, which indulges my particular fondness for villanelles; and occasional posts about something else – often serving as catharsis, because I have a bee in my bonnet – and these are filed under Randomness.
Aside from this blog, I maintain a presence on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Threads…but they’ll invariably point you here.
I boycott X (formerly known as Twitter), aside from publishing the outcome of my daily encounters with Quordle and Octordle. This spamming is a small, silent protest at the utter ruination of a once great social media platform.
I tend to write old-school, long form posts about the subjects that interest me, in the hope that they may also interest you. All my published writing is fully and freely accessible: I stand against the proliferation of subscriptions and paywalls.
If you would like to discuss anything you read here, do please use the contact form below. Especially if you’re a fellow Dracup, or descended from one.
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TD
January 2026
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timdracup.com 