I've been researching Christopher Marlowe for an article. Marlowe is 450 years old this year (born just a few months before Shakespeare) wrote six rather extraordinary plays and worked undercover in Sir Francis Walsingham's dirty tricks department - the Elizabethan equivalent of MI6.

Then in 1593 he disappeared - in Deptford. Legend has it that he was killed in a tavern brawl but maybe not. A body was buried in St Nicholas's churchyard, very close to where my Please Miss We're Boys happened, but who knows if it was Marlowe's. Some think he took a new identity and ... well almost anything.

Ironic though how often Deptford seems to recur in my life these days. Nearly everything I touch, one way or another, comes back to it. Only last week I took my granddaughter to see Peppa Pig - written, directed and produced by Limelight Productions which is owned by Richard Lewis. Richard was in one of my very first classes at 'Creekside Comp'. And I'm often invited to shows at the Albany, a dynamic arts centre just off Deptford High Street.