The Rearda Gallery
Stories and Artwork by Janet Georgiou
A Short History of Me
I was born Janet West on 8th February 1956 in Iserlohn, West Germany, in a British Military Hospital, to Sgt Major Fred West and Mrs Margaret Ella (Peggy) West; their second child of five.
Dad was in the army - The Lancashire Fusiliers - until I was 11, and I guess my longest stay in any primary school was about 18 months. Apart from the travelling, my childhood was pretty uneventful, apart from when I walked out in front of a van on the Great Lime Road, Newcastle, when I was 10 and spent five days in hospital while they sewed my head back together. "A good job it was only your head", said my dad, "you might have damaged something vital." Hmm!
At my secondary school, The Lakes School, Windermere, I spent most of the time gazing out of the window. I always had, and still retain, the ability to switch off completely from my surroundings into daydream mode. I don't think I got one school report that didn't say I had my head in the clouds. I left at sixteen, married at 18 and had a son, Brian, in 1975 and daughter Linda in 1977 (Linda's blog). The marriage didn't last, and I married David in, I think, 1982, whose main redeeming feature was that he was a good dad to Brian and Linda. We divorced, and in 1991 I married George Georgiou and had three more daughters; Nicola, Rachel and Katherine, who are all keen dancers.
With no great desire to 'get some in', my travel has been mainly confined to England, which I love; especially Cumbria, Devon & Cornwall. I also love South West Wales and Scotland. Other places I've been (apart from the accident of my birth and some early years being in Germany) are France, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Spain, Greece, Belize, Mexico (Yucatan) and Iceland (brief stopover in the USA once but didn't see much).
Work, between childbirth, has mainly been of the admin assistant variety, except for when I went around installing computers and running training courses on how to use them in the 1980s, with a brief spell as an Employment Officer in the early '90s. What I really like to do, of course, is to write, draw and paint. The Brewery Arts Centre Project is gobbling up a lot of my spare time, but I do hope to produce a book in the fairly near future. Illustrations are already posted on this site and on Scribblezone, and excerpts from early chapters will be added closer to publication.
Err..... that's it.