A little about me:

I was born in Sheffield Park station in East Sussex which is now the home of the Bluebell Steam Railway - in the back bedroom overlooking the platform, if you're interested. When the line was axed by British Rail we moved to Bexhill-on-sea and into the stationmaster's house at Sidley.

My childhood was an adventurous one and I spent my time playing in the rock pools on the beach; climbing down the chalk cliffs of Galley Hill with what amounted to nothing more than tatty lengths of threadbare rope; crawling into disused badger sets and other stupidly dangerous things.
In those days you really could be away from home from dawn until dusk without anyone wondering if anything unspeakable had happened to you - although how I survived some of the things we got up to I'll never know.

I grew up more or less intact and went to Lancaster University to study English. There I learnt to drink bitter and developed a great fondness for the craggy vistas of the Lake District. My vacations I spent working as a volunteer in a psychiatric day centre in London.

After graduating I sort of stumbled into jobs at The Sunday Times, the Greater London Council and, when that was abolished, BT. I wouldn't say it was exactly a planned career but snatching redundancy money when it was on offer and running, certainly was.

Writing is now what I do with my life - mainly because it is the only thing that makes any sense of who I am and who I want to be; that and being a farmer in Spain. I have a motorbike that I spent more time polishing and fettling with than I do riding, enjoy gardening, adore real ale and occasionally find the time to be sociable; but everything fits in (or doesn't) around my writing: that is the way it has to be.

I was always more gangster than moll The loser in a snowball fight