About Me

A brief bit about me.

I am in my mid sixties and live in a small bungalow near Stafford with my second wife, Terry Anne and our little poodle, Daisy.

When I left school, without any qualifications or ambition, my mother suggested I became a painter and decorator so I got a job with a local firm. All went well for nine months but then my Dad came home from work one night and told my Mum, me and my five siblings that we were going to emigrate to Melbourne in Australia. Details of my time in the land down under, are told in my book, "The Reluctant Pom" details can be found here.

Anyway, I did my two year sentence in Australia and returned to England when I was eighteen. I did couple of jobs in garages, but finally settled in a factory that made electricity meters. Over the next thirty or so years I climbed the rickety ladder of promotion and ended up running the factory which had a workforce of over two hundred people and I was responsible for monthly targets that exceeded two million pounds.

During that time I married my first wife, who I met in Australia, and had two sons. I worked hard during the week to pay the bills and went fishing at the week-ends to relieve the stress. In fact, I got quite good at fishing and won a lot of trophies including the local championship for two years in succession.

Life was good, in fact it was too good to last. My wife walked out on me after 21 years of marriage leaving me to look after our two sons. I got married for the second time a year later and things were looking up again. Then a few later, after 33 years in the factory I took a redundancy package and set myself up in a freelance writing role. I wrote stories and articles for magazines and entered a few short story writing competitions. All was going well again until I had a heart attack and finished up with 2 stents in my heart and a pile of pills to take every day.

While I was recovering I did more story writing and, to my delight, I won a national competition and that set me on to the road of writing books. My first love was fishing so that is what I wrote about and other books came later. To find out more about my books you can click here to go to my website or click the tab above.

Besides fishing,  my other hobbies include pyrography

and some scroll sawing.

The only trouble with pyrography and scroll sawing is that the end results take up a lot of room. Our little space is becoming cluttered with my boxes and bowls, so I'm moving to art because pictures don't take up much room in a folder and, if I eventually do produce something easy on the eye, I can frame it and hang it on the wall.

Last year we moved to a bungalow that was going cheap but in desperate need of a sorting out.  I am pleased to say the work is almost done and now it is time to spend some time on art. If it doesn't work out I will probably buy a fish tank and sit in a corner looking at that for the rest of my days