Yastreb, I’m not at all surprised. You have retained your youthful looks extremely well. I mean, I’ve known you since you were what, around twenty, and that was a long time ago.
I think the recognition thing that gives me most trouble is the number of people who recognise me and come up to speak to me, whom I don’t know. In part this is because my distance vision is going, and I have to really focus on an approaching face to get the features clear, but mostly it seems to be that down the years I have had a lot of public exposure in situations of speaking to audiences while giving talks on things such as food gardening, bushcraft and folklore, leading classes through the bush, being the storyteller at many years of Mediæval Fairs, libraries, schools and folk festivals, singing in folk clubs, teaching small classes in useful practical skills as part of the Recreate project, plus decades of lecturing to botany classes and running conservation projects. Not to mention a bit of stage and stunt work, and being part of a few documentaries. While I do remember many of the people whom I have taught, especially the ones who asked intelligent questions, there is no way that I could remember them all! And my voice also seems to be distinctive, since even nowadays, years after I did my last radio work beyond an occasional interview, people will overhear me chatting to a friend as we walk down the street and come up and speak to me about things I have spoken of on air.
It surprises me that people remember me, because I could scarcely be called a dazzling beauty - I’m tiny, under five feet tall, stocky build, longish once-red hair that is now mostly white, and have scars and enough of a limp to walk with a stick.
