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 been rebuilding my life, mainly by entertaining the possibility that the best years of it may still lie ahead. My delightful new partner, Tracy, has helped me to reinvent myself.
I have reorganised the posts here to make it easier for readers to find what they’re interested in.
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 29 posts in this series.
UK Walking. Tracy and I have built our relationship through walking together in the English countryside. I recount here our steady progress along the South West Coast Path, the Thames Path, the North and the South Downs Ways. These posts are now grouped accordingly, under the name of each path/way.
Holidays is self-explanatory. Roughly half are walking holidays, but all are grouped in the same category.
Book reviews is a rapidly expanding category. These mostly chart ‘the road less travelled’ in English literature (because I’ve already travelled the road paved with canonical works). Almost all of my books are purchased from Oxfam – my shelves groan under the weight of this collection – and they’ll probably return to Oxfam when I go.
Music: I’m working through a series of twelve experimental posts about music I particularly like. It is called Ouroboros, because I hope to end exactly where I 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 in sub-categories in my Archive, including: 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.
My only contributions to X (formerly Twitter) report my daily struggles with Quordle and Octordle. This is a small, silent protest at the utter ruination of a once great social media platform.
I write old-school, long form posts about the subjects that interest me. All my published writing is fully and freely accessible: I do not hold with 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
July 2025
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timdracup.com 