I spent my childhood in St Albans, Hertfordshire, where I attended St Albans Grammar School for Boys (later known as Verulam School).

I left for Norwich in 1978, to study English Literature at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Immediately after graduating in 1981, I completed a PGCE at UEA’s School of Education, qualifying to teach English in secondary schools.

But I was more interested in education than teaching and, as luck would have it, soon became a junior civil servant in England’s Department for Education, formulating various elements of national education policy.

I was involved in the introduction of the GCSE examination and student loans. I also worked on aspects of the school curriculum and in-service teacher training. I climbed the grades.

The final decade of my civil service career was devoted to establishing and embedding a coherent national policy for the education of our most able learners.

I led England’s Gifted and Talented Education Unit throughout its existence.

In 2010 I took early retirement, switching to a life of house-husbandry, freelance writing and consultancy. I specialised in high attainment, fair access and gifted education. This allowed my wife, Kate, to develop her career.

I operated partly through a social media alter ego – Gifted Phoenix – who blogged and tweeted about my specialisms, as well as wider aspects of national education policy.

Those blog posts are now museum pieces but are still accessible.

When Gifted Phoenix returned to the ashes, I retired from education, having spent over 30 years in the field. My swansong was an independent review of effective practice in widening participation and fair access, commissioned by the University of Oxford.

Then Kate died from breast cancer in Summer 2017. She was only 56. That awful experience has changed me almost beyond recognition.

A year later, my father’s death gave me too much grief to handle. I hit rock bottom, enduring a horribly debilitating mental health breakdown.

Since then I have rebuilt my life, with huge assistance from Tracy. We first met through our bereavement group, (which still continues, some nine years later) but she has since become a delightful partner and walking companion.

I am extremely fortunate to have her in this ‘second life’ – she is my second chance for happiness.

The posts here reflect my current priorities:

Dracup family history. Like other Dracups, I’ve curated a family tree, but I wanted to weave the bare facts into richer life stories, placing individuals in the socio-historical context in which they lived. I have now published over 30 posts in this series. I strive to make each post historically and genealogically accurate; to present the good, the bad and the ugly without being judgmental.

Walking in Britain. This small island contains some of the world’s most luscious countryside. I recount here our progress along the walking trails that take one to the heart of this natural splendour, illustrating each post with my favourite photographs. These guides may help those who follow in our footsteps; they may also help bring the experience closer to those unable to enjoy it. Guides to the South West Coast Path, North Downs Way and South Downs Way are now complete. The Thames Path and Pembrokeshire Coast Path are works in progress. The posts are grouped under the names of the relevant trails.

Holidays is self-explanatory. The majority are walking holidays in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, but all are grouped in the same category.

Book reviews. These comparatively short-form posts tend to 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 consumed the vast majority of canonical works.) My choice of books is dictated by what I pick up from the local Oxfam Bookshop or, just occasionally, what is out of copyright and available to download to my e-reader.

Music: Last year I completed a sequence of twelve monthly posts about pieces of music that are important to me. The series is 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. You will find homages to artists as disparate as Ella Fitzgerald, the Blue Nile and TPOK Jazz!

Kate and bereavement is self-explanatory. Until last year, I marked Kate’s birthday by publishing a bereavement-related post. It is something I may return to in due course.

Photography applies to all the pictures I take and publish without accompanying words.

Everything else is now grouped into sub-categories in the Archive. It includes: my final 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.

You will also find there ‘Trumpery and Knavery‘, an occasional scrapbook marking some of the more egregious behaviour of this appalling United States government.

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, 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 typically write old-school, long form posts about the subjects that interest me, in the hope that they may also interest you. They’re written exclusively by me, not by AI. And all my published writing is fully and freely accessible: I do not hold with 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

August 2026

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