My own story - so far...

1960 was when author Ian Rankin and actors Hugh Grant and Colin Firth were born. I came into the world in March of that year in a hospital originally built in 1888 to treat patients with infectious diseases for the Wirral Poor Law Union Workhouse. Clatterbridge is in what was until 1972 part of the county of Cheshire. In the Doomsday Book the border of the Wirral was determined to be two arrow flights from Chester city walls, so I like to think of myself as a Cestrian, born and bred.

My father was a scientist. He came from a family in the East End of London that can trace its ancestry back to Elizabethan times as watermen and lightermen on the Thames. By contrast, my mother's family was a mixture of emigrant Irish Catholic and Shropshire innkeepers, coopers and carpenters.

Like many kids from parents that had boot-strapped themselves away from material hardship, I was brought up to love the outdoors, expected to study hard and find my way into a good profession. I survived school, fairing reasonably in science and maths, and I went on to attend the University of Bath to study engineering.

Quickly thereafter, I joined an old established consulting firm operating in the power industry based in the northeast of England. The job sounded intriguing at the time, and so it proved to be for a good many years! I was surrounded by luminaries and spent my time chasing work in ever more interesting places around the world. It was a brilliant period for travel, and I had a lot of fun. In the end, I wound up living in New Zealand, and am now able to give my time to the self-indulgence of writing for fun.