My writing journey over fifty years or so has taken me from writing poems to over 100 published magazine articles with a sprinkling of short stories along the way. Eight published books later and being a regular contributor to an online magazine, I’m still on the writing speedway!
I was born in New Milton, Hampshire, and grew up in East London. My childhood heroes were Julian, Dick, Anne and George, with George’s dog Timmy, Enid Blyton’s fabulous Famous Five. I lived, breathed, slept, ate and fantasized with them, sharing their adventures on the Island, loving their impudence in daring to stand up to bad people and bossy adults. Other loves were Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories and Longfellow's Hiawatha that I learned at my mother's knee.
At the age of twelve I wrote up the news in verse and progressed, in my early teens, to my first story, the love affair between King David and Bathsheba as told in the Book of Samuel. It must have been the King’s creative method of getting rid of her husband that caught my youthful attention!
I started my working life in the Geography Department of City of London Polytechnic, now London Metropolitan University. I switched to working with the Exec which gave me a university-wide view and were very happy years. When I retired, I started my own small business as an Electronic Note Taker (ENT) for deaf students after training with the RNID. I was mostly employed by them, but also by many agencies. It was a joy to go into lectures with the students, who usually had Sign Language Interpreters (SLI), and record the main points of lectures on my laptop which I would then email to the student. Subjects ranged from English Literature, The Age of Romanticism and The Classics to Social Science, Economics and even Engineering, which was a real challenge! The job enabled me to master Level 1 British Sign Language (BSL) and to meet many amazing SLIs and students, all of whom were beyond bright and attained their Degrees.
Visit My writing for a deeper dive into the huge learning curve that I travelled in fathoming Writing For Today.