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Born to Polish parents who emigrated to a quiet town on the Thames. My mother traced her family through a long history of freedom fighters to the founders of Lithuania with a great grandfather related to Karol Szymanowski and a Ukrainian poet in the family. Her father was a prominent commander in the Polish Navy and a legend in his own time. From her parents, my mother inherited a passion for history and a native love of mazurkas and flowers. My father was also a son of a Polish Navy commander, whose own family originated in Polish eastern lands now part of Belarus. My father was a research chemist and provided the logic yet always with a love of antiques jewellery and fine wine. A strong creative streak kept him busy as a painter, jewellery maker and antique restorer. 

 He fixed broken things not to mention the silver smithing of salt and pepper pots fashioned into a grand piano and double bass.

An inventor it was my father who fashioned  the device for the disabled piano student who couldn’t otherwise use the pedal.

With parents such as these I grew up in an artistic, creative if not chaotic household.

Ballet lessons were taken aged 3 but with inward rolling feet I was never destined to be a dancer. Stage school was attended but messy hair, wrinkled socks and a lack of shiny kit, annoyed the teacher. It was many hours as a toddler that I watched student’s fingers whizzing up and down that really got my attention. I begged for lessons and was refused on the grounds of being under 5 years age. Stubbornly I didn’t give up and doodled at the keyboard until my mother gave in. My first compostition “a haunted house” featured the obligatory semitones but was not up to that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The love of piano was deep and I’m not sure I remember a time pre piano. My first performance, I was so excited I ran up to the stage and promptly fell flat on my face. It took a  while before my chipolata sausage fingers would fly across the keyboard but I remember the day they finally took flight in the way I had always envisioned.  A moment of true finger motion freedom. The feeling, I imagine, a bird has when after much flapping he soars high above.

I studied hard, won a dog with my first prize money, and went to music conservatoire with a scholarship. Several others followed abroad. Combining studies in Western Europe and Eastern Europe has given me insight into both worlds and I admit I am happiest looking east to Poland with snowy winters, colourful summers and the love of dance.

There were tough times, choosing where to study? How to fit a piano in to various flats. Where to settle?

Some of those questions may never be answered and will it matter?

My road is the one Debussy summed up as “Art is Life and Life is Art”

Life has always been filled with stories and colour allowing my imagination to roam free. Its what drives me - the ability to dream and express a myriad of emotions and images through music.

They say Charles Dickens used to walk 12 miles around London for inspiration. I cycle around a city where I will be unitenitonally found singing snippets of random notes (mostly out of tune) taking in my environment. Travel is essential and a fascination with any culture new to me.

History, travel, dance, art, film, pyschology, they are all part of my everyday life. That’s why my twitter feed includes alpha, beta and Zog.

A to Z from neural path waves to the mention of an old Albanian King whose name like Nebuchadnezzar always tickled my fancy.

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