About me...

I do many things, I possibly even do some of them well.

In family life I'm the Husband of the Vicar in a small village that you may recognise from Midsomer Murders on ITV ("Barnaby" outside the UK). I am a parent to two children, an adult daughter with autism and severe learning disabilities and a now adult son with a thirst for vinyl records, comic books and general geekery.

Our dog, Bella, died in 2016 (RIP) but later that year we took in a boy Bichon Friese (Peanut) whose home broke up. He's an enthusiast for walks (good) and chewing electrical stuff (not so good). In fact he's an enthusiast for everything, except baths. Peanut was joined by Blue, a black Labrador pup, in 2017. Blue is now growing into the most Labrador of  Labs: one look and he'll break your heart. Not that I'm soft with the boys. No way.

What else? I once was a physicist (I have a PhD: Neural Network Studies of Lithofacies Classification you can read it and everything, the university got is scanned in!) but swerved to work in an office many years ago. My employer has asked that its staff don't say who exactly they work for and who am I to argue with that? Not sure how I got out of the lab: I think they left the door open.

I'm a reader by inclination and enjoy fiction, especially SFF/ weird, crime(ish), history, nonfic about places. Would love to receive such books for review, still prejudiced in favour of hardcopy (death to all trees!) but pragmatic - I'm on Netgalley and have a Kindle app and everything! I can be reached via the gadget on the homepage, or as blue book balloon (but one word) at outlook dot com

Also: Curator of an unruly garden, eater of soft fruit, occasional wielder of an archaeology trowel.

And latterly, I've begun a part time masters in Public Policy at LSE...