When Tommy McHugh had a stroke, it was the moment that someone pulled the plug on his matrix. That’s the way he puts it, anyway. Strokes usually change people’s lives but for some, like Tommy, they change everything.
He looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise the face looking back at him. His wife was a stranger. People told him he was a builder with a criminal record and a past as a streetfighter but he didn’t like the sound of that. He far preferred the vivid and fabulously varied new world he saw now. Having previously had no artistic inclinations, he’s been spending every moment since his stroke trying to capture what he sees in thousands of paintings, drawings, sculptures and poems. “I can