Historians, it has been said, are rather like a good bottle of wine...they mature with age. Being seen as a rather crusty claret may not be a bad thing and I've now reached the point in my life when I feel it right to air-as with the claret-my own reflections on the nature of History in an increasingly challenging environment. I do not claim that my own life has been anything other than ordinary but when you get to a certain age I suppose you start to look back on things. What follows is an otiose attempt to make sense of my own life by intermingling autobiography with materials on History, teaching and learning initially written often at speed as part of on-going debates on education and history but now revised in the more cloistered solitude of my study.