My life took a significant turn a couple of years after I retired from The Presidents, when in late 1965 I was hired by a Montreal-based design firm to work on a major project for Expo ’67, Montreal's World Fair. My contract was for 12 to 18 months, after which I'd planned to return to London, but fate intervened.

A few weeks after arriving in Montreal I met my future (and present!) wife, Louise. 18 months later we married in Cheam, Surrey, by which time I had decided to return to Canada where I’ve now lived for over 40 years. Canada has been very good to me while marrying into a French Canadian family meant I had the opportunity to learn French, while Louise learned English.

On Valentine's Day 1968 we became proud parents of our daughter, Martine, who has since gone on to accomplish great things in the international wealth-management field (She's now managing western Canada operations for Swiss banking giant, UBS). In 1969, I left the design business and went into the advertising business (taking to it like a duck to water), over the years becoming one of three partners in a mid-size advertising agency with offices in Montreal, Toronto and Brussels.

In 1986, when Martine started at university in London, Ontario, we moved (mainly for business reasons) to Toronto, where we lived for three challenging years during which I learned that three-way business partnerships should be avoided at all cost. This revelation precipitated the decision that a significant change of lifestyle, with a lower stress level, would be judicious. So I sold my shares in the agency and we trundled off to Vancouver, in beautiful British Columbia, where I opened a home-based marketing communications consulting practice. Martine joined us 18 months later and is now married and living just five minutes drive away from our home. In July 2006 she presented us with Sophia, our delightful granddaughter who has given us much joy and a different perspective on life.

For my 50th birthday in 1992, Louise bought me a second-hand set of drums. Aas I hadn’t played for some 30 years I was in dire need of tuition and one heck of a lot of practice. Developing a renewed appreciation for (modern) jazz, led me to study under one of the city’s top jazz drummers, who eventually had me playing better than I’d have thought possible. It's conceivable that had I kept on playing through all those years I might actually have become reasonably good at it! Regardless, I’ve since played with a variety of swing and jazz bands and even did six months’ of weekend gigs with a trio in a local jazz restaurant, backing a procession of jazz singers.

I now play in an amateur, but quite talented, 17-piece swing band which has obliged me to learn how to read charts and develop a big-band style of drumming, which I thoroughly enjoy.

I retired from my marketing communications consultancy in mid-2004, and now enjoy a more leisurely, comfortable lifestyle, surrounded by mountains and sea in the city that The Economist magazine once rated as "the world’s most liveable city".

Thanks to email I’ve been able to keep in touch with Rob Mayhew and Colin Golding, and have the pleasure of working with Rob, rebuilding and maintainingThe Presidents' web site, helping to preserve the memory. It seems a lifetime ago when we first played, with so much trepidation at Bermondsey, and made our first trip to the IBC Studios in London for our first four-track (wow!) recording session with Glyn Johns, who unlike the rest of us went on to become rich and famous. Now, thanks to Rob’s initiative and the extrordinary effort on the part of his nephew Paul Willmott in Bermuda, we have two fabulous, re-mastered CDs of demo and other tracks laid down by the band between 1959 and 1964.

My time with The Presidents was one of the most memorable periods of my life in England, before leaving for Canada at age 23. In those days we worked hard and played hard, living in hope of making it big while earning next-to-nothing for our considerable efforts (who did make the money, I wonder?). Still, we had one heck of a lot of fun during what had to be some of the best years of the 20th Century… and lived to tell the tale. All in all, we should consider oursleves lucky.

P.C. Nov. 2008

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