My whole teaching career changed as we moved into the 90's and the College re-organisation (which saw many staff leave), elevated my role to that of a manager for several programmes of study. With the subsequent increases in my responsibilities, I became what I had always fiercely resisted, an administrator. I found it almost impossible to juggle the demands of organising, planning, reviewing and implementing complex departmental issues, with my own work at that time. Consequently, my paintings were put "on the back burner" and my creative energies relegated to writing/designing new courses and overseeing their introduction into an ever expanding department.

Much of the work I did produce tended to be small-scale studies in watercolour and crayon, often in sketchbooks, with copious notes/plans for large scale paintings I knew were impractical, given my commitments at the College. Nevertheless, I persevered, often starting a painting only to paint others on top or, because of a lack of continuity, I would leave them unfinished for several years. At one point, I was working on a mythological painting about Odysseus and his struggles to find his way back to his home and family in Ithaca, a favourite book since I was a boy. It now occurs to me that this was strangely analogous to my own predicament at the time; always at work, seeing little of my family, often tired and short-tempered, doing my best in a job to which I was never really suited temperamentally or spiritually. These years took their toll on me and looking back now, I see them as the desperate years when I was driven by my ego not to give up and to remain in control despite the pressures.

The odyssey was never completed as such, instead, it developed into a double portrait of my daughter Rachael as a young girl and also a young woman on a balcony in Greece. All of the elements I had been working with as separate studies came together much later in 2002. Similarly, a portrait of my son Dan was begun and remained in a state of flux for several years until my retirement in 2000, when I determined to revisit all of the works I had left "on hold".