Author: Fiona Mylchreest

Fiona Mylchreest was born in the beautiful middle of nowhere in Scotland, and stayed there for 18 years. She went to teach in China and then to Oxford, where she read Classics and English. She planned to be an art historian, but gave it up and went to work for a medical charity in Calcutta until she ran out of money. She joined the Overseas Development Administration (now DFID) where she managed aid programmes to India, negotiated EU banana policy and ran the programmes for Poland and Romania, during which she did an MSc in Culture, Gender and Society. Secondment to the Foreign Office as Private Secretary to Malcolm Rifkind and then Robin Cook was fascinating but frustrating so she left and went to Chelsea School of Art. Photography and combined media was wonderful but abandoned instantly when her first son Finn was born at 28 weeks. After three more premature babies and about a person-year in NICU, she started a BSc in Health and Social Care, finished in Josephine Barnes Ward waiting for her fifth baby. By this time, Finn had been diagnosed with autism; his catatonia responded only to music therapy, so the family began supporting the music therapy department (and still are, 14 years on). While the fabulous five are at school and college, she runs a charity which manages a college for 19-25 years olds with severe autism and a respite home. In-between times and all the time, she is mother of five, carer of Finn, joint owner of a escapologist tortoise and an energetic and water-mad black spaniel. She supports Borne because she is eternally blessed to have five unique children who survived prematurity and so that other babies are spared the lifelong challenges which prematurity can bring.