In 2009, I had to produce a biography suitable for posting on Twitter:
Wrote a novel about South London.
Received death threats.
Left the UK for Hong Kong.
Writing a novel about Kowloon Tong. No death threats yet.
If you want to read the South London novel, please go here for details.[1]
My ambitions are: to have 1,000 hit points, to kill Great Cthulhu, and to be a self-motivated, independently-minded team player capable of strategic thought, simultaneously detail-driven and focussed on the Big Picture.
I'm a philosophy graduate from a university somewhere in Northern Europe, with a chip on my shoulder or two. Well, around about one hundred (some as yet undocumented here).
After graduating, I went to London to seek my fortune, only to find out that the streets weren't really paved with gold, or even with enough stock options to buy a yacht. If you want to stamp on this naievete, stamp gently, for you stamp upon my dreams. It was 1999 and we were all convinced that the dot-com was going to make us rich enough to never have to work again. Or work while we were waiting for the IPO, in some cases.
Bitter grumbling aside, I had three years working for the poster child of the British internet boom, and then packed it in and went to work in Kent for four and a half years. I have ambivalent feelings about Kent; when the sun is shining and the lambs are hopping through the fields, it's a beautiful place to live. When the clouds settle and it begins to rain, I only ever wanted to die.[2]
After four and half years in Kent, where for the last year I drove back to London every weekend, I changed job, and worked in Soho for fifteen months, after which time the company sent me to Hong Kong. It might be inferred from this wayward peripatepism that the people I work with would do absolutely anything to get me as far as possible away from them. Infer all you like; imply it to me and I'll get very cross.
In between times, I've published five issues of a mountain bike magazine.[3] Between 2005 and 2009 I ran six marathons, including three in the Arctic Circle.
Unfortunately, living now in Hong Kong attempts at sporting excellence are a thing of the past for me; natural laziness, long work hours and polluted air have conspired to give me excuses to avoid exerting myself while clad in lycra or other artificial fabrics. I hope to arrest this deterioation and begin running again soon, but with the wisdom of age I realise this may be a forlorn hope.
My principal interests are currently:
stand-up comedy
search engine optimisation
writing
travel
These are in no particular order of priority, and each informs the other to some degree. Most likely through the inspiration of Richard Herring's Sisyphean Warming Up I'm currently attempting to write at least one thing every day; unfortunately unlike that exemplar not everything I produce is currently to a standard I am happy with.
Having embarked on a project to produce as much writing as this, I would like other people to see it; hence every month or so I try some form of search engine optimisation. Perhaps this has brought you here, rather than your hoped for destination of $CUTE_KITTENS_SINGING_MILEY_CYRUS.
If the other three interests can ever adequately fund the fourth, I would be a satisfied man.[4]
[1] If you want to send me death threats, I can be contacted via your local police station.
[2] I had a good antecedent there; Simone Weyl famously arrived in Ashford and pronounced that it was "... a beautiful place to die." Which she shortly did.
[3] To our chagrin, this was not an endless opportunity to receive free stuff for 'testing' from bicycle manufacturers, but rather a new vector to receive anger and hatred from people we had never met. After a month of accidental sobriety, we never published another issue.
[4] If not, there's always footnotes. Although I notice that sadly, Blogger doesn't like that sort of html very much...