On 3/2/15 it gets written that ‘Chalkie’ is Mike White, erstwhile arts and health agent for the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University and abiding research fellow of St. Chad’s College. He has also been to some degree responsible for delivering the Angel of the North to Tyneside and for steering the development of the anarchically influential arts company Welfare State International in the 1980s. After 15 years at Durham, however, he took early retirement in the autumn of 2014 due to advanced prostate cancer with metastatic spread to the hip bone. The ‘Demon Diary’ will be occasional rants and reflections during the progress of the illness and a means of signing off from the arts in health field in which he has worked for nigh on thirty years from ploughboy to scarecrow. He once wrote a book about it all called Arts Development in Community Health: a social tonic (2009).
By means of links and other hooks and crooks on the net, it is hoped these occasional diary postings will find a gentle and serendipitous readership. Perhaps we have been on the lookout for each other.
(With many thanks to Mary Robson who set Chalkie up for this).