Hi, I’m Lois Pallister, a Londoner, born and bred, and have lived in the Crystal Palace area (or Sydenham) since 1986.

Whilst I love the English countryside and take every opportunity to travel around the country, very rarely ever venturing into the city, I am happy with where I live and work and doubt I’d consider moving away from my little corner of Outer London/Kent.

I was born in 1963, the same year that my poor long suffering ‘hubby-type-person’ passed his driving test and bought his first car which was a Mini!

In 1986 when I met Reg (the hubby-type-person), I was driving a 1963 Singer Vogue which had wing mirrors rather than door mirrors, with the handbrake on the right, a foot operated main beam button down by the side of the clutch, and a starting handle!

Following on from a couple of other ‘professions’ I became a driving instructor in 1995, a vocation I still enjoy to this day.

My current car, a new Mazda 2 Sport Nav, sports the 2015 number plate I got at the beginning of the year. It dawned on me that this plate would be available back in 2009 so it was a long wait! But worth it to have my actual business name “Lois School of Motoring” as my car registration.

I still love seeing the classic cars on the road but over the years as a driving instructor, getting a new car every year or so, I’ve now been spoilt by all the new features and technological advances.

Loving the speed limiter and cruise control, automatic headlights and windscreen wipers and climate control on the Mazda. And the excellent onboard computer offers a great built in sat nav, a brilliant hands free set-up, where even any texts I receive are read out to me and much more.

The two USB sockets have already come in very handy and the tons of safety features are great, despite my initial concerns about them. I think you can tell that I love ‘Black Betty’ and the pupils I teach to drive seem to love her too.

So what of my other interests, hobbies and passions? Well they are very many!

Perhaps just a tad too many, which might be the reason that I am such a total tangent-brain, flitting from one project I’m all fired up about to the next, with many of them not being completed until years after their conception! But I do get there in the end.

In fact my father, who was a school teacher trained to teach English and History but who ended up teaching Maths for most of his career, once said “That girl has such a butterfly brain”. This was when I was just 3 years old and I’ve been the same ever since!

Time to calm down now, methinks, and get serious about those things that mean the most to me.

I am a bit of a chip off the old block, loving the English language and being very passionate about history, English medieval history in particular. However, although I do use ‘Maths’ in many of my projects these days, I can’t say that it was ever a subject that enthralled me!

I love cottage holidays in the UK, with the hubby-type-person and my camera, having been into photography since my teenage years.

I make more of these holidays by creating very detailed itineraries of 60 pages or more and then making a slide show of some of the photos for my PC monitor. A little obsessive perhaps but it leads to great memories.