Paul Onslow (10/10/07)

Ahm… well… I just, I just… looking through the magazines, an’ then, there was a gardening magazine. And, ahm, with climate change an’ everything… myself, looking around, from when I was, like, ten… in summer an’ stuff, there were more flowers around an’ stuff. And ahm, I just thought, yeah, if we carry on way we are, these beautiful flowers and things are gonna be gone in 20… 30 years time. So… I wanted to like put a message across, y’know. that’s why I thought of flowers for the background, an’ then the message over the top, y’know… ‘you can change now’. Y’know, it’s, it’s about trying to change, to stop loosing them things… that can be so beautiful. An’ that’s it really, y’know. A lot of people were just stickin’ anything on. But I, I thought about it for about 15 minutes beforehand, before I started, an’ I got everything cut out before I stuck anything down. An’ that’s when I went… y’know, ‘cos I ‘aven’t done anything like that for so long, y’know. But I really enjoyed it, y’know, if I can enjoy doing it an’ then it can get a message across as well, all the better… y’know. That’s it really. I loved art [at school], yeah, I loved it, yeah. They said that, ‘cos I didn’t do any GCSE’s, my teacher said, If I’d stayed and done my GCSE’s, she said ‘you’d have got an A’, straight away y’know what I mean. She said ‘you’re really…’ know what I mean? But… That’s why I’m gonna go to Open Learning [at St Anne’s]… learn a bit about photography as well. Stuff like that, y’now. ‘Cos the chap at St Anne’s that does photography, he wants me to get involved. ‘Cos he saw what I’d done this morning, and he like said ‘will you come up and have a chat wi’ me’. So I did, and he says ‘will you please come’, and… y’know what I mean? So… definitely wanna get into it, ‘cos I really enjoy expressing myself. When you see what you’ve finished it’s a nice feeling y’know. So, yeah.

Note: Paul Onslow contributed Life as Now and curated Hardev Kaur’s Handmade Relaxation and Exercise Tool.