TAKE OFF and LANDING

'Take off and landing' refers to the ascent of the protagonist from teenager to adulthood. There are several conditions that make this particular case especially interesting. Firstly, this teenager (referred to as Dy) comes from a distinguished family. His grandfather was described in the BBC Obituary as "the last of the great Edwardian Bohemians". One of his aunts was awarded an OBE for her work as a wood engraver. An uncle wrote all the words of the songs in Ivor Novello's musicals. The same uncle wrote the libretto of William Walton's opera 'Troilus and Cressida'. He was also a poet and won the Hawthorndon Prize. Dy's notorious cousin was a movie star and played the Virgin in the film 'The Virgin and the Gypsy' (based on D.H.Lawrence's short story).

So when Dy won a choir scholarship to a good boarding school in Oxford, He felt predestined to achieve some kind of fame himself. It was almost a sense of duty.

Dy was amazingly successful at two extra-curricular activities in his last years of secondary school: as a poet and as an artist. He wrote a good few poems, some of which were published in the school magazine. Some of his paintings were exhibited in the Young Contemporaries Exhibition, a collection of the best work from all UK art schools held each year in the centre of London. Dy had never been to art school but one of his teachers was later to become the Keeper of the Royal Academy. He taught Dy to paint (in an academic way) so well that the National Portrait Gallery requested his permission to include one of Dy's works in the Heinz Archive of portraits - available for researchers in the history of British painting. This was Dy's portrait of his mother, painted when he was 17 years old.

Dy was not only a poet and artist but also a mathematician (dy/dx is the differential in Calculus). When it came time to choose a career Dy told his surrogate father, his English teacher, who had taught him to paint, that he was worried about devoting his life to the Fine Arts because he felt the need to do something useful to society. Eventually, this teacher advised him to become an architect because it was the only field that combined form-making with knowledge of geometry: Art and Math. He then proceeded to make possible his enrolment in the 'best architecture school in the world': The Architectural Association in London.

Dy kept notebooks, one of which had a title: 'A Strange World'. In this, he wrote a strange request. It was a message to his future self, Dx. Essentially it said to his future adult self: "Wherever you land in your future adult world, take a break and look back at the achievements of your younger self and make something of it" So Dx wrote TAKE OFF AND LANDING.