Sign In / Register
At 82 years old, Alan Watkinson only recently retired as a physiotherapist, and is planning to write a fifth book.
The inspiration to write came out of the blue after he had a quadruple heart bypass in 2016. Alan says he’s not much of a reader, apart from the Bible, and had not written any poems since his schooldays in the 1950s.
He says the operation, which came with complications, was “a kind of reset”.
“I’d been given a second chance!” Alan says.
From there, the poetry flowed, inspired by Alan’s lifelong Christian faith. In two years, he wrote 120 poems, mostly in the middle of the night.
“I wake up with words running around in my mind and get up and put them down on the computer,” he says.
The cover art for his poetry books, created by grandson, Brinley Watkinson, depicts Alan in his trademark flat cap, having ‘a lightbulb moment’.
He has received good feedback on his writing, which he has shared at his church, Illuminate, and with his men’s prayer group.
The most recent book, The Boy who Gave, is Alan’s first work of fiction, inspired by a Bible story, and demonstrating how beneficial it is to give to the poor.
Alan has lived in the Peninsula Club for 11 years. He says when his wife Lynette died in 2010, he kept going until around a year later, when grief hit him “like a freight train”.
He got through it after the chaplain at Hibiscus Hospice advised him to keep busy, get support from family and friends and see his GP.
He did all those things, including heading to remote mining towns in Australia, where he earned good money as a physiotherapist. Until lockdown last year, he was still working, offering treatment to Peninsula Club residents, and receiving things like baking in return.
Alan has a few favourites among his poems including the one he wrote about the rebuild after the Christchurch earthquakes. Another, which he knows by heart, is called I’d like to go to Heaven someday, before I die.
“I’d like to go to heaven, someday before I die
And see the folk I miss and never said goodbye
But then I remember there are some folk on earth
I’ve never said to them that they do have some worth”
Alan is planning a public launch and reading of his books at the Peninsula Club in the near future.
Info, or to order books: email alan@watkinson.co.nz
