…although much of my time was spent doing Ents during my second year and some of my third. After leaving Bretton I became a primary school teacher in Featherstone, which I absolutely hated, and left after one year.

I then tried to earn a living doing art, but I was either not good enough or too lazy and, following my friend Martin Snow, I started working for YHA, in Edale, Derbyshire, where I had visited him. I was taken on for 5 weeks, but lasted 32 years, 26 of which were spent in Chester.

Following foot and mouth in 2001, YHA’s fortunes began to change and it was decided to close the Chester hostel, making my wife and myself both redundant and homeless. Having experience with IT and training, I started work for Cheshire County Council where I was an IT trainer and consultant for ten years before retiring in 2016.

At this point, I decided to take up oil painting, something I hadn’t done for forty years, as a hobby. Despite having little experience and not much of a clue as to what I should be doing, I was surprisingly successful in that I enjoyed doing it, and other people liked my pictures. All of my paintings can be seen on my website  mikeprocter.art  so you can judge whether or not they are any good. You can also see my work, and that of other Bretton alumni on my other website brettonart.uk

I’ve been married for almost 49 years and have two children: a son who got a Drama degree at Bretton; and a daughter who got an Art degree at Leeds Uni – the course she did had been moved from Bretton.

It seems a little unfair on all of the people in my life, over 73 years, to select just three of those years and proclaim them to have been the best; but what Bretton did to me and was for me, and how it has stayed with me, and shaped my outlook and attitudes, it’s hard not to believe that those three formative years were very special indeed.