About ME

It'd be fair to say there's a lot of variety and also some recurrent themes, my Amazon page is linked:

I speak to groups everywhere from conferences to regular meetings (for groups like u3a, Probus and WI). The subjects are varied, though music, the paranormal and writing are well represented on my current offer on Speakernet:

My long strange trip of writing and consultancy includes the Guardian, Viz Comic, Radio Four and the glove puppet Sooty and his pals. For those of you unfamiliar with Sooty, he famously doesn't speak, so he's a writing challenge. Putting it simply I'm never short of ideas. What kind of writer am I? An employable one!

I've been working part-time since 2004 in the marketing team of Pennies Day Nurseries, a role that increased when I left my academic career a few years ago. Currently my work includes establishing partnerships and working on our environmental efforts.

During a lengthy academic career I led the developments that founded the UK's first university course in Professional Writing, and ran it for 20 years. I still consult on writing, for both writers and publishers, and do the occasional specialist workshop:

I've written, lectured and generally been obsessed with music for decades. Since 2012 I've been playing the kind of records ignored by streaming services to the kind of people who don't use them, on the show Strange Fruit. One of the three stations currently hosting it is Bombshell Radio:

A brief but lively sideline that lasted a few years included two novels, a magazine column and some live work as Stanley Manly. There are no plans to bring him back, but it was fun, so you never know. He still has an Amazon page:

This site is a brief introduction to a working life that's never been simple, for anyone wanting to know more there's a contact page below. If you've arrived here because you have to say something brief about me before I speak to a room, there's a short and worthy Wikipedia page:

I do tweak this site with random links to things I really care about. Currently top of the list is the life-affirming Terminal Hillness project undertaken by my life-long friend Ian Teasdale, celebrating his own life and raising vital funds for cancer care. He tells his own story in the link: