About Duncan MacDuffie

Who is Duncan MacDuffie, What is Me?

At the age of 65 I am a committed green person following a right on healthy diet, getting lots of walking and cycling, and have just converted my handyman business to a limited company for tax reasons. It wasn't always like this. During the seventies I was unhappily lecturing in inorganic chemistry at what is now Kingston University, still trying to be a straight man and even talking of getting married eventually. What rubbish! When I saw a poster on the back door of the Poly advertising a student gay group, I was so shamed that I "came out" and have participated in gay groups ever since - I particularly like spiritual gay groups.

But being gay, although important to speak about, isn't the be-all and end-all of my life - far from it. I love campaigning work for green issues - and I mean green in a pretty wide sense - writing awkward letters to people in power, supporting worthy green causes, banking ethically etc.

However, soon after I "came out" in 1975, I did something even more drastic! I handed in my resignation at the Poly and went to help a middle-aged couple in the Scottish Borders run a small residential hotel providing excellent meals and accommodation to tourists in the summer and conference parties in the winter. Unfortunately there was no discrimination as to who was allowed to come and help, so the couple ended up with an unruly rag-bag of young people who argued interminably about everything and exhausted everybody including myself. So the couple closed the whole thing down less than a year after I joined. I became suicidally depressed but survived due mainly to Canon Peter Spink of Coventry Cathedral of all places. Through him I moved to a conference centre and retreat house in Worcestershire where I made beds, cleaned, washed dishes and did odd jobs. After a couple more places, I worked in a tour operator office in London NW7 enjoying the work up to a point, though the pay was appalling. Then I got an idea for the handyman business I currently run - the House Clinic - and have been doing this from 1982 until now.

Before lecturing, I taught in a direct grant Grammar school in Lytham, Lancs. Before that I had a long period amassing academic qualifications in the USA and Cambridge so I could avoid the industrial rat-race that I as a chemist would have to work in. I lived in the USA in the fifties - the button-down generation we were called - everybody conforming and keeping their heads down while the likes of President Nixon ruled - communism was evil and consumerism good. What a pity my grandfather's cousin after whom I was named died before we returned to the US from Aussie where I was brought up. Not only did he develop the very best suburbs of Berkeley California, but he was a founder member of the famous Sierra Club which pioneered conservation of forests on the West Coast. He even has a mountain which he climbed in the Sierra named after him. I feel very proud.

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