What are the stories we tell ourselves and to what extent do they reflect our current realities? This is not so much a blame game to pin responsibility for my present on past events, more an attempt to recognise how past influences have shaped present realities. Was the family myth about who I was the basis on which much of my subsequent career as a quantity surveyor developed, until I decided to change it to a photographer nearly forty-two years later? My memories before the age of about five are practically non-existent, and yet I have been told stories about myself from that time, so presumably I absorbed impressions, emotions and experiences from around me subliminally. Even after I became conscious (relatively speaking) of myself I was still an impressionable child influenced, for better or worse, by family, teachers, authority figures in society, church and friends. I have read that children come into this world as a blank canvas, in which case I’ve needed to re-evaluate what was written by all of these influences in the book of my life, doing some editing and re-writing as I’ve been going along.