As a child I had what I perceived as an idyllic life running wild in the Northumberland countryside miles away from anywhere. My heroes were Biggles, Douglas Bader, Robert Stanford Tuck and a host of other flying heroes and naturally I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I grew up.

I achieved the first step by passing my 11-plus but things fell apart when I had to start wearing glass at the age of thirteen.

I spent my teenage years in Sheffield where my art teacher at King Edward VII school recognised my artistic talent. He put it to good use by assigning me a square of his enormous reproduction of some apocalyptic masterpiece to paint in pseudo pointilist style alongside the other gifted pupils. He subsequently tried to persuade me to go to art college, but by then all I wanted of education was to be free of it. I left school as soon as I could and went into the first job I could find, as a junior clerk in the personnel department of the East Midlands Gas Board.

By my late twenties I had been an assistant manager in a chain store in Brixton, an encyclopaedia salesman in Birmingham, a bus driver, a driving instructor, a waiter in the Algarve (in Albufeira when it was still a small fishing village) and a delivery driver in Dusseldorf. Now back in the UK a girlfriend discovered that I could draw and decided to take me in hand. So it was that I ended up back in the North East as a mature student and, thinking I should do something "useful", chose to do graphic design at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University).

I spent most of my time there doing anything but graphic design and at the end of the second year was invited to repeat the year. I knew I'd be wasting my time. I wasn't at all interested in getting stuff into print, which was a pity - that being the object of the course. The highlights had been meeting some lovely and very talented people, seeing the film "Tommy", and enjoying the legendary summer of '76 as a student .

That was all a long time ago. Between then and now I've been a fairly aimless traveller through life, but the one continuous thread has been an occasional burst of artistic energy which resulted in the contents of this website.

I have recently also developed an interest in photography and making jewellery - oh, and sailing.