Bio

My wife and I, and a very twitchy rescue cat, live high on a hill on the beautiful Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia, overlooking Tuggerah Lakes and the Pacific Ocean.

I produce technical documents, online help and training material, carry out proofreading and editing and the occasional manuscript appraisal, design and develop websites, and develop video games. (For more information on these services, see Perisys).

A little bit more about me…

I was born in Nottingham, England and went to High Pavement Grammar School (motto: Virtus Sola Nobilitas – Virtue is the only nobility). My English teacher in Classical 3 was the 1974 Booker prizewinner Stanley Middleton.

Unfortunately, the school took issue with my poor attendance and we parted company.

 I was fifteen.

(Although it’s irrelevant, High Pavement was also the school attended by Dr Harold Shipman, the prolific serial killer. He started the year I left. My late brother-in-law, Eric Harris, was Shipman’s sportsmaster.)

After umpteen jobs – factory worker, van boy for a laundry, trainee electrical engineer at a tobacco firm, under-manager in a hosiery factory, door-to-door salesman, bus conductor, accounts clerk, paralegal – I landed on my feet. At the age of twenty-three, I was working for a finance company when it decided to install its first computer. On the basis of an aptitude test, I was selected to become a systems analyst/computer programmer. Thus began a lifelong career in information technology (IT) that took me to Sweden and Finland and then to Australia with my wife and two infants in the mid-seventies. It proved to be a very wise move.