Academic stuff didn’t interest me very much when I started secondary school in the mid 1960s. I was a kid more interested in sport and art. To further encourage the latter, I had an inspirational art teacher right through my school-days. He was someone I never got to thank properly but who, with the retrospection of having passed “three-score years” I can see was a real influence on me.

Harvey Sklair was a bit of a local legend, and I’m glad he’s properly remembered online. He was a very good artist, a point possibly lost on a class full of eleven/twelve year-olds, but what stuck with me was that he didn’t just stick a brush in our hands and point at the paints, he talked to us about why art mattered. He also emphasised that great art was all around us, and that you didn’t need a knighthood or a…