The Accidental Memoir began with a dilemma: what to buy my father for Christmas. Dad was raised in a Cypriot village, his house centrally heated by the family horse who shared the living room. He travelled to England in the 1960s with five pounds in his pocket and spent his first night in a telephone box.
I had the idea of buying a notebook and filling it with prompts that would encourage him to write about his experiences. I hoped it would draw a quiet man out of his shell and help him recognise the specialness of his life.
He began writing almost immediately and I discovered things I didn’t know. He’d been working on an invention for a petrol-free engine, had a flair for rhyming couplets and often thought about a…
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The Big Issue United Kingdom (Digital) - 1 Issue, 7/9/2018