Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

In this very candid interview, Alan Le Grys, who teaches in the Religious Studies department at Kent, talks about growing up in the South London suburbs, on the edge of the largest council estate in the UK, in a house that, when he was young, it was thought might be haunted, and where he felt the presence of his deceased grandparents. Alan reflects on how at school he was the last child to be picked in football, but has in later years embraced running. He has, for example, run the London Marathon for charity, and Alan talks about the ritual of ‘dressing the part’ and offers the aphorism that one needs to ‘Make something routine so that it becomes so much part of your rhythm that you are freed to enter into it.’ Alan discusses the role that music has played in his life, principally in the form of ‘Bach, Beethoven and the Beatles’, and we learn which of the Beatles’ eras he considers to be ‘headache music’, and why. He also talks about why he returned to playing the piano in later years to grade 5 standard a