So the stars aligned to offer me the chance of a lifetime to design, curate and build a museum dedicated to Britain’s industrial past from scratch.

A part time job as the caretaker at Botley Mills evolved into a full focus on bringing their Heritage Centre to fruition – a project that has tapped into a broad spectrum of my interests, skills and knowledge as well as helping expand them considerably too.

The opportunity emerged when I helped my employer pull together material and displays for their Centenary celebrations at the end of 2021. At the evening event it was announced that a space dedicated to the history of Botley Mills would be created during the following year.

As soon as I saw the part of the old mill building that was being designated as a museum space my mind went into overdrive imagining the story that could be told in exhibits and graphics.

Once Ken, the mill’s resident builder, had done an absolutely sterling job fixing beams, floors, walls and ceilings, as well as adding toilet and kitchen facilities I had an excellent blank canvas to work with.

After walking around the space and studying the previous work that had been done back in the 1990s to envisage a working roller mill museum in another part of the enormous site, I came up with a proposal for topics and visitor flow that covered off all the key aspects of milling from the 1000 plus years of history at this location.

Way back in 2013 I wrote a post on the earlier generation of this blog after visiting the Grand Designs exhibition in Birmingham in October of that year.

I was working closely with a high performance window manufacturer at the time and this was the first show they had exhibited at.

The seeds for my own ‘Grand Design’ were planted at that event, as the last section of that old post illustrates.

Back then I was imagining a high quality garden building that incorporated features such as spa facilities, skylights, bi-fold doors and green roofing.

The bottom line is I have always wanted to design and build something from scratch that incorporated the majority of key building techniques and requirements. However, I’ve never really wanted to take on a whole house project.

So when the family suggested that it was time to replace the old log cabin that I had kept adding to over the years I decided the time was right to bring my ‘Grand Design’ to fruition.

There’s only one road in and out of Key West – which is part of its attraction. And what a road it is !!!! Featuring the iconic Seven Mile Bridge it stretches over 100 miles through the Keys from Key Largo at the top to Key West at the bottom.

Obviously, having just one road means there is absolutely no alternative route should something to wrong.

Unfortunately something went very wrong coinciding with our recent visit.

About half way through Key Largo the traffic ground to a halt and it became apparent we were eight miles out from an incident of some sort. Being eight miles out turned out to be a fraction of the 30 mile tailback it became.

The information from the local Monroe County Sheriff’s office seemed uncharacteristically sparse and simply said the US1 was closed south and north bound.

So we waited, and waited and waited and crept through Key Largo as traffic ahead bailed out. The amazing beach front hotels, restaurants, dive shops and gift stores were passed agonisingly slowly as I checked for updates and looked up the traffic cameras to see if I could work out what was happening. All I could really see was vast stretches of empty road beyond the boundary of Key Largo and solid lines of traffic backing up right beyond the top of the Keys.

The year 2020 was burned into my consciousness as far back as 2006 when I first set up my 2020 Visions blog.

It seemed a significant milestone in my own life and its association with ‘vision’ also made it sound like a significant milestone  in the future of humanity. Indeed, the three core themes of the 2020 Expo – Opportunity, Sustainability and Mobility – sought to provide an optimistic outlook for the challenges facing global societies.

However, 2020 will now forever be associated with the start of the first, and hopefully last, pandemic of the 21st Century and has marked its significance in our world’s history for reasons doubtless not predicted by the majority of futurists.

If there was one thing that I remember from trying to anticipate and predict how the 2010s might progress, it was how many times the world had to deal with unpredictable events.

In terms of anticipation and prediction of my own future, in a post I wrote in 2009 called ’10 Hopes for the Tens’ I expressed a hope that a cure would be found for my progressive and profound deafness. I was thinking more along the lines of genetic therapy or engineering but in the 5th week of 2020 our wonderful NHS gave me a cochlear implant operation. Again, an increase in Government funding for this amazing technology and a lowering of the thresholds for qualification meant this happened 10 years earlier than I had personally anticipated.

The implant was switched on 3 weeks later and then 3 weeks after that the UK entered its first COVID-19 lockdown. I still feel immensely lucky that I had the operation when I did as the waiting list for this type of surgery is now enormous.

It took over 12 months for me to learn to hear electronically again and so the delay of Dubai 2020 Expo by a year due to the pandemic is in some ways fortuitous as I am now visiting it with my hearing abilities as good as they were 30 years ago.

Another aspect of my 2020 Visions blog and my hopes for the 2010s was the progression of my daughters to adulthood.

Never did I imagine when starting my semi-retirement job as part-time caretaker at Botley Mills this week that I would be on ITV News on my second morning.

I also never imagined that my 15 seconds of TV fame would feature me clad in work clothes sweeping up sewage infested sludge.

How fast life can change !

I’m sure the good people of Germany never imagined their peaceful, picturesque Westphalian villages being swept away by flood waters and a lot of their friends and relatives being killed during these last few days of a summer month.

At least nobody died at the mill – but it was literally just a few inches away from being a much bigger disaster.