From his hospital bed in Westminster, Alan would admire the architecture of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben just opposite.
A prodigious craftsman himself – for a bank, the Islander once built an entire Narnia set piece from scratch – he spent hours studying the fine details of London’s most world-renowned landmarks.
Health issues meant he had endured years of shuttling back and forth between hospital wards in Jersey and specialised units on the mainland.
While the illnesses slowly ramped up, his eyesight began to deteriorate – culminating in an operation to have the front of his eye removed completely.
“From 2018 up to 2024 everything went really downhill, then in 2024 it got absolutely a nightmare through to mid-2025,” he said.
“Then, I had to go and have the front of my eye removed completely, which then made it so I couldn’t see anything at all.
“That was literally when it took an absolute nosedive…from 2018 onwards I had to stop making things because a) I couldn’t see, and b) I couldn’t do.”
Life, Alan explained, “literally just sort of came to an abrupt end: “I [then] had a triple aortic aneurysm, it was undiagnosed for a very long time – I was quite ill.”
His previous hobbies and obsessions – building sets, designing mannequins, making models, transforming piles of rubbish into sculptures – were now more-or-less completely out of the question.
“You do get to that stage when you start thinking you can’t do anything anymore, and you sort of become a vegetable”, Alan told.
Another favourite past-time, one he shared with his wife, was watching horror movies – but even this, he said, became prohibitively challenging.
“It was case of [not being able to] watch anything set at night time – so you are literally just sat there looking into blank spaces.”
But by sheer coincidence, however, Alan soon found his whole world transformed.
Through his daughter – who is autistic and receives support from Enable Jersey – he was signposted to EYECAN, Jersey’s only dedicated sight-impairment charity.
The organisation immediately provided him with the understanding he’d spent years searching for unsuccessfully.
“You can try to contact other people and try to find information on [sight impairment], and you don’t get steered in the right direction.
“You’ll have them sort of steer you off to the States of Jersey website and stuff like that, you get a lot of disinformation.”
During his first proper interaction with EYECAN, Alan and his wife were taken on a walk around St Helier and supplied with crucial information he hadn’t been able to find online.
He found out that underneath traffic lights, for example, are cones with buttons that can be pressed to help disabled and sight-impaired people know when the road is free to cross.
Alan recalled: “They showed us how to get safely from one place to another place, what to do and how to get around, things where if you would literally to try to find that out yourself, you wouldn’t.
“But that’s where they’re good, they are actually good at telling you thinks to make your life better, they make things as clear as possible.”
An initially left-field suggestion that Alan return to his passion for arts and crafts was the one that proved the most dramatically life-changing.
“[They said] ‘right, why don’t you get back into it?’ I said it was because I can’t see anything – but they said ‘we can help you.’”
Help came in the form of the ‘DaVinci Pro’, a desktop video magnifier that delivers HD clarity and extreme-zoom to help aid daily tasks for sight-impaired people.
The device, alongside special magnifying glasses, allowed Alan to “hold things and paint them – all sorts of things – and it’s just rocketed from there”.
Not even the most optimistic EYECAN staff members, one would suspect, could have foreseen the imminent explosion of creativity.
The tourist hotspots staring him in the face for years during endless periods of convalescence in London were now made spectacularly real again, but this time in sumptuously detailed model-form.
He told me: “I have just finished making a clock which is gold and black, and a cello music box, and a cello, and an Eiffel tower, Big Ben, a Land Rover – and I’m just in the process of making another clock and a fire engine.”
Also in the ever-growing portfolio are a Chinese jewellery box, a model of London Bridge and a wooden model of the Houses of Parliament.
Talking on the phone from his house, Alan said: “This machine, the Da Vinci, is absolutely brilliant; it takes something that’s like 0.6mm in size and makes it 6cm – so it is very easy to use.
“It’s been great fun, it’s been absolutely great fun because it’s sort of, like, opened a new door, there is more for us to do at home.”
Especially dear to Alan is his creation of a cello music box comprising 120 separate pieces, in which “every single cog had to be lined up in the right order to make it work.
“And that’s where the DaVinci came in useful, because they mark the cogs with a little arrow, or a little zero, so you can line them up properly.
“If you don’t line them up, [the cello] doesn’t work and everything’s made out of wood so you have to make sure all the cogs are perfectly symmetrical with each other.
“It is quite detailed work to do, but I must say that one – out of all of them – is probably the hardest, but the most rewarding out of them all.”
Before the indefinite loan of the Da Vinci by EYECAN, Alan described life as “just more boring”.
“Because of other medical problems we didn’t get out often; we’d end up sitting around, vegetating, not using you brain – which is the biggest problem.
“You can become braindead and then you get into a horrible rut which then affects your mental health.
“You get up, sit around, eat food, repeat: and that’s what it was like all the time, the only difference being is you probably go shopping, and shopping’s a nightmare.
“My wife is the first person to complain I’m a hazard when we go out shopping, either I get in people’s way because I can’t see them, or turn around and knock people because they’re too close.”
He added: “When you go blind, or nearly blind, your restricted on what you can do, you always have to have somebody with you and you can’t do things like you would normally.
“Having an outlet, or having something you can do, makes a bleeding big difference, especially to your morale and your mental state.
“Because it can get you quite down – I was lucky, I actually knew I was going blind – but for somebody that suddenly goes blind it’s horrendous.
“That’s where EYECAN do come in because they can actually take away a lot of the fear and apprehension and get you doing things, back to doing something you enjoy and you can do.”
Sometimes, Alan said, his wife will do a jigsaw puzzle while he wiles away at at his models.
While they might be working in silence, they are together, and occupied with a shared sense of creative purpose.
Long afternoons spent struggling to watch movies or scrolling through Facebook are now, mercifully, firmly in the rear-view mirror.
“It opens a lot more doors”, Alan stated. “Now the days just fly by.”
Agnetta Nerac, community team manager at EYECAN, said that the charity “are here to support Islanders living with sight loss through practical support, daily living equipment and rehabilitation.
“We not only focus on day-to-day tasks such as cooking, reading and getting out and about, but we understand that hobbies are hugely important in supporting people’s wellbeing.
“We are delighted that the Da Vinci magnifier has been so successful in helping Alan reignite his love of crafting, and we’ve been inspired by the pieces he’s completed so far.
“If anyone feels they would benefit from the support offered by EYECAN, please contact us on 864689 or email info@eyecan.je”
