On the 3:rd of Mars in 1944 I was born in Gothenburg and since then I have lived here or as now, twenty km outside. I love my house and I am not the type that likes to move around. My parents were Peter Anker Dickson, of Scottish and Norwegian background and Ivy, born Lamm, a Jewish family. When I was one year old my grandfather, Robert Dickson, died and we inherited two connecting apartments in the inner part of Gothenburg.  Pretty soon after one of them was converted to my fathers office, Dickson & Ahlmo,  and he got very close to his work. I do not remember much from my childhood, but if I have been correctly informed, the first four years were pretty normal. On the 26:th of Mars in 1948 my little sister Diana was born, a very charming person, who has taken everybody by storm her whole life. Unfortunately she has lived the major part of her grown up life in Stockholm and we have lost some of the close contact we used to have as children. We had another three fine years with daddy and mummy. In our home there also were two older half brothers, Robert and Clarence, but they were only at home during holidays and they were born -29 and -30, so the difference in age was pretty large.

When I was seven years old, both my parents remarried mainly due to the fact, that my father was seriously ill and soon after that I hade a new little half sister, Charlotte Jenssen, Lotti.  In those days children were shared in another way than what you do today, so I lived with my mother and my new stepfather during the terms and mostly with my father during holidays. I also was big enough to go and visit my father myself so right then the divorce was not something negative to me. In 1952 the year after Lotti was born, we had a little brother, Michael. I remember when we were told at 07.30 PM after we had been put to bed. Diana and I were so happy that we jumped up and down in our beds shouting, “We have a little brother, we have a little brother”.

In 1956 my father died and I was devastated. The grief was so large that I literary still feel it. He was the warmest most wonderful person that ever lived on this earth. Everybody loved my father from employees to us children.

At school I was never any exemplary pupil, calm but at the start a slow learner and then when I  finally learned to read, I passed every other pupil and read an extra bookshelf on top of that. Or at the high school at a physics trial where we, “the mortal pupils”, were given five questions out of seven and needed three correct answers minimum to pass and the last two questions were meant to be solved only by the extra smart pupils. Guess what two questions I solved and only those two. How do you grade a pupil like that? This is the story of my life and has made me pretty difficult to evaluate.

After a zealous firm Lutheran upbringing I entered my grownup life with absolutely no self confidence and lousy school grades. In those days you were of age at 21 and many moved from home at that age. After trying mathematics at the university I re-entered high school and graduated as an engineer 4 years after my first graduation. This time I had very high grades with an A in mathematics, not very strange considering I had read it all before. I first worked as a laboratory assistant and later as an engineer. One of my favourite work was as an oil laboratory head down in the oil harbour. It does not sound very attractive, which only shows how difficult it is to say what would be. Since the oil laboratory closed down in 1992 I have alternately worked as a computer teacher and alternately have had no work at all. Because I love to teach and I love computers so it really is a shame that I get less and less work just because of my age. We live in a strange society were the elite is just thrown away.

At the end of the 60:ths I was still unbalanced and my future to be gave me a cat as a present. This turned my life around. Since then my cats have always helped me throw the ups and downs of  life and I still have four cats. For almost twenty five years I was intensively involved in all parts of the Cat Fancy. Mostly interesting I found breeding issues, planning, evaluating results etc. Extremely difficult as always, when nature is involved, but stimulating. About some of this you can read here:

www.pirotcattery.se/catintro/catintro.htm

There is also an article about me more specifically from a Cat Fancy point of view, but since it is not written by me, it has not been translated into English.

www.pirotcattery.se/ingrid-wahlborn/ingrid-wahlborn.htm

I also have had other hobbies such as photography. I got my first camera when I was ten years old. I will never forget it, it was a brown Kodak camera. We always got our “Best Christmas present” as the last present on Christmas Eve (in Sweden the present are given on Christmas Eve) and usually it was something nice to wear when being dress up. But this year I got the camera. I remember sitting dead quiet for a whole hour in a much too big and slippery silk chair with tears silently running down my cheeks. For many years my husband and I travelled cheaply and primitively but with an exclusive Nikon camera equipment. Today I have 18 000 sorted slides in the basement and I might point out, that while sorting slides you usually throw 40 % away. One day I hope to be able to present some of them here at the Internet but scanning slides is time consuming and very boring.

Another of my hobbies had been different Asian sport like jiujutsu, judo and table tennis. I have tested once for blue belt in jiujutsu and travelled the world around for varies world championship veteran table tennis competitions. But in lack of ball control I could never win anything important. Still I sometimes wonder with my aggressive offensive way to play, what might have become of me if I had started as a child instead of when I was over 30 years old. Unfortunately children’s  possible talents were not taken care of then as they are now.

In 1975 I had a wonderful little boy, Christopher. When he was 8 his father had a classical 40 year old crisis and left us after having lived with me for 17 years. When Christopher was 11 the divorce started to show negative side effects. To day we all keep our fingers crossed.

As early as when I was 20 years old my interest for computers started. I sneaked into our technical high schools’ lectures.

On the road until today I have studied 2 programming languages and attended one technical computer course. But I do not remember much from this and I am not very technical when using my computer. I mostly make homepages focusing on beauty something I think there is far to little of on the Internet being dominated by technical freaks with or users with no sense whatsoever for neither technique or layout!

In Swedish