I was born and brought up near London (in Dartford, Kent, 17 miles away from Trafalgar Square), but now live in Swansea, South Wales, (my grandfather's city), where I am slave to two rescue cats, Honey and Bumble.

I am, by turns, a novelist, poet, children's writer, songwriter, arranger/producer, screenwriter, features journalist, publisher, editor, film producer, activist, campaigner, activist, cat fan, entrepreneur and survivor of skin cancer - (and stalking...long story, ongoing...) - and somehow I manage to scrape a living. The BBC script department once said that I was 'good at comedy' & an 'accomplished writer', so it must be true LOL. I'm an 'award-winning' author too. Yippy-do...

I am, at present, developing a range of writing projects, but have now finished my psychological Nazi crime thriller (intended to be a best-seller first of a series). There is a saga of a story around that - which I cannot share yet BUT which the media can have in time.

I have also now finished writing a VERY timely psychological thriller about online harms, with a malicious obsessive female cyberstalker aided in her hate campaign of revenge against an innocent author by corrupt police. A neat 92,000 words. I'm submitting to agents and publishers at the moment, though I know many in publishing are, these days, sadly rather cowardly, avoid & shun anything controversial. Sad, that. Tragic. A betrayal of everyone & everything.

As an author and an activist with something to say in my art, my craft, my vocation, I cannot accept that, or write drivel to get past the gatekeepers. I'd rather not write anything at all, than be tied to the yoke or some 'party line' system reminiscent of Communist Russia or Nazi Germany, or Iran, China or North Korea now. NO PASARAN.

However, whichever agent/publisher takes a punt on this will have a bestseller on their hands - I am 100% confident of that.

It is INSPIRED by a true story, my own lived experience, so very authentic and timely, but it is FICTION - though the media/PR around it will feature my story of being targeted by a deranged maniac online for nearly 2 years and 10,000 words of abuse with 12 clear points of defamation (disgusting allegations some STILL THERE on my Goodreads pages aimed right at me), a prolonged antiSemitic hate campaign of harassment in which UK police were complicit, incredibly. I am suing them for substantial damages. And, as my cyberstalker obsessive 'Baby Reindeer' troll not only defamed me, incited thrid parties to do the same, and then lied to police (which I can prove with digitial evidence as the PUBLISHER of my last 3 books), there will be a prosecution and legal action. Oh yes there will! Watch this space.

I am working on some short stories now too, just for fun, reworking 3 crackers from a batch I wrote some years ago, and finishing 3 original ones. I already have enough for a collection and may self-publish that in the next year or two, just for my fans, may not. I want to hold some back to enter to big short story competitions when I can, so may not publish a collection at all. Who knows? Nothing definite yet. 

I have several Middle Grade children's books in development. II have two such MG books in-hand, completed, revised, tweaked, ready to go, to get published, including DINOSAUR JOE - I published just 30 copies of that for friends and fellow dino-fans. Feedback has been great. It is a PROPER children's novel, not dumbed down, gimmicky or woke which most MG books seem to be now, sadly (well, at least we have the archive to read).

PLUS I have plenty of screenplay ideas, a TV pilot, several radio dramas completed & treatments, & a short multi-lingual multi-ethnic short Christmas film set in Cardiff. I hope to get that made one day.

Anyhoo, FAMILY TIME:

My mum was Welsh (born in Carmarthen, grew up there and in Bridgend, then lived in Swansea where her father's family were from, they were smiths in the Vivian copper works; her mother was from a poor family, her dad a market trader of cloth bought from the richer bits of their weaving family, no doubt due to all the sheep in Wales). My mother's mother's family were all weavers, going back centuries, some relatively wealthy, including Evan James and James James who wrote the Welsh national anthem (more later). My only known English ancestor - John Nelson - who came to Wales from East Anglia to marry my great-great-grandmother was a weaver.

My father was Flemish from Belgium. His mother was a maid to the Germans. His father (or step-father) was a post office accounts clerk. My father's real  biological father was probably a German Jewish doctor - I think my grandmother was a maid to that family so maybe he was her employer in Limburg, Belgium, where my father was born in 1921 in St Truiden, in the Belgian province of Limburg, which was the ancient Kingdom of Loon (yes, really) - Limburg is where Maastricht (the most besieged city in European history) is located.

For reasons unknown (but his sister married a British serviceman so was already in Britain) he came to the UK in the early 1950s - so no wonder I am SO disgusted if anyone DARES call me racist for stating reasonable, non-racist opinions about the issues around immigration and integration of incomers or lack thereof.

After arrest by the Nazis in 1943, and a night in a cell as a slave (destined to be slave labour in the V2 factory in Holland maybe), he then hid out from the Nazis for a year on a farm to avoid Speer's call-up for more slave labour workers for the German war machine.

This is all ONE BIG REASON I have always, and shall ALWAYS, defend Jews against antiSemitism - from racist individuals, to institutions such as governments and councils, and what I see as the systemically anti-Semitic UK police, which some may call the pc gestapo these days. And this is why I am an activist against anti-Semitism/racism and a campaigners against police corruption & brutality.

And so, I have largely Welsh and Flemish/Belgian ancestry, with a bit of English (ancestor from East Anglia, immigrant to Wales 1800), and possibly German. International beauty! Multicultural me! LOL!

I've lived in four different countries - including Czechia, (Prague) and Greece (Crete) - so I tend to be internationalist in my thinking. I speak - or, rather, understand - several European languages. 

My overactive imagination and creativity developed early as my only escape from a challenging childhood in a very stressful single parent family with money worries and more, living with a stutter/speech impediment as a kid (as depicted in my as-yet unpublished middle grade novel DINOSAUR JOE).  That does NOT mean I am an 'ally' of any professional victim who tells me I must be their ally as one did on MY book pages on Goodreads. Don't work like that, luv. I need no tribe, especially not one of loonytoons liars and professional perpetual victims bloated with self-pity. Shoo! Away with yer...

As a boy I told myself stories a lot (my late mother once told me she used to stand outside the door of my bedroom or bathroom and listen to me aged 5 tell them to myself...). I wrote my first full song aged 14 (composed music from age 12). I have used bits of my childhood poems in my books.

One such poem is in RASMUS -  A TELEVISION TALE, my reality TV novel which got interest from the biggest film agency in the USA (LA) in 2017, and which SQUID GAME resembles very closely (which I am sure is TOTAL coincidence...) Btw That poem in RASMUS was written when I was about 8 in Mrs Tovey's first year class at West Hill Primary School, Dartford. Now in print. Yay! That novel also predicts a reality show with celebrities and sharks, now showing... SIGH...

I always have a multitude of creative ideas bubbling under my usual serene and calm swan-like elegant exterior (LOL!). Coming up with ideas has NEVER been an issue for me. The way many creative courses teach students how to come up with ideas baffles me - I just do not get it. They may as well be talking Klingon. Creativity comes naturally as breathing to me. Writing the ideas up and editing text is what takes a LOT of time and effort, focus, dedication & HARD WORK.

So, I always have loads of ideas for novels, short stories, kids' books, screenplays, poems, songs etc. I always have had. Not a problem for me, instinctive. Natural born author. An artist mind, I suppose.

However, my versatility as an author may well count against me. If I just chose genre fiction (romance, crime fiction) and stuck to that, building an ebook list, no doubt sales would be higher. Ditto the publishing industry these days have been called 'pathologically obsessed' with being inoffensive - perhaps why I find the vast majority of new novles tedious beyond belief. Great fiction and especially satire always offends, if it has something to say. Most books now do not. They are the intellectual equivalent of the colour beige, and I find I have no reason at all to buy or read many, if any, newly published books. Why buy boring? All that genre fiction tosh.

I think it was Hanif Kureishi who labelled this 'the North Korea of the mind' and sounded as appalled by the present 'sensitivity reader' wokery of publishing as I am. Anyway, let us hope for the SAKE of great literature and our children's heritage that this nonsense does not last. At present, it does seem to have rather a stranglehold on publishing though, which is sad & depressing.

But I am who I am and I write what I write, on my 'journey' (or struggle...). But hey, I focus 100% on that journey and have faith in my creativity.  

I have a weakness for speaking my mind and offending people - which is actually a strength, of course, originating in the strength of my convictions and my stubborn Welsh blood. When I know I am right, then I am right, and will fight to the death when I am. The End.

Discipline and hard work are needed to be an author. Most people quit, never finish - or even start - the novel they'd always planned to write. Some need the comfort blanket template of formulaic genre fiction to cling to, in order to do that. Each to their own... But to be an author involves years of slog and drudgery, frankly, timeconsuming and unpaid. Amazing then really that so many make the course and finish the race, to get their fiction published in any way, and then to sell (and each of my books has sold hundreds of copies). It is a great achievement being an author, a great adventure!

You become a writer when you write. You become an author when you learn to write AS YOU, in your VOICE, your own unique way of writing, thinking and being.

And you become a published author not because of encouragement, but in spite of discouragement and there is plenty of that about. I have had plenty of rejection over the years, could wallpaper by room with all the rejection slips, letters, emails... Rejection is always awful BUT it is part of the process - there is not one author who has not got rejected and multiple times too. Of my 10 published books, I only made a serious attempt to get three of them accepted by an agent of publisher - A CAT CALLED DOG (shorter 2015 version); RASMUS and THE NINE LIVES OF SUMMER. Each of those books went on to sell hundreds of copies when I published them, with RASMUS - A TELEVISION TALE (2016) predicting many horrors of reality TV now (maybe why it still sells and is borrowed from libraries and photocopied a lot, as it may be a set book on some media/TV courses somewhere). The average first novel published 'properly' via a big publishing house sells 400 copies, and nearly 70% books lose money for publishers. Ditto with movies. It is the tiny number of bestsellers and blockbusters that keep the show on the road really. Most mid-list authors earn very little from books alone, and sales are modest.

I was educated at Dartford Grammar School, various London colleges and the University of Sheffield. I have a degree in English literature, a PGCE-PCET teaching qualification, a TESOL Cambridge Certificate (grade A), a Music Technology national certificate, and LCCI management, ecommerce and marketing qualifications. Like many journalists, I know a little about a lot of things and am a generalist - though I do have areas of expertise too (e.g. education, media, cats, dinosaurs, history, The Second World War/Nazis.)

I am a (former) college teacher/lecturer/private tutor and occasional freelance journalist (for TNT/Southern Cross, Your Cat, The Cat, The Guardian and local press), but mainly make a living now via my own online editing and proof reading agency. 

I'm also a songwriter. Free listening to some of my tracks here:

https://soundcloud.com/user-217675148 Ten of my song lyrics are in my debut poetry collection THE LOVED ONES (54 poems in total), and 9 have links to the sung musical demos, so real multimedia then.

I have been a campaigner for a better Welsh NHS + other causes, especially improved male healthcare, a very underfunded and ignored area, and THAT is the 'gender health gap' actually. I was a participant in, and contributor to,  the late Ann Clwyd MP's report on the NHS complaints system 2013 (commissioned by David Cameron) - the soundbite "the default setting of the NHS complaints system is one of delay, deny and defend" was coined by me and used to promote the report across all TV and news media. I was featured on ITV News at Ten, ITV Wales News (2013 and 2014) and BBC Radio 4's World at One talking about that campaign from my very own 'lived experience'. Fame at last! More coming soon. WATCH THIS SPACE.

I'm a fearless supporter of freedom of speech and expression, something under real threat in society these overly-authoritarian days of our fingerwagging, prissy, pofaced New Puritan Age complete with what could be called our 'pc gestapo'.

I am an activist fighting anti-Semitism and its racism, and a campaigner against police corruption, dishonesty and brutality.

I used to say the UK was sleepwalking into a police state. I take that back - we are here already. 1984 is here and now. Know it.

I am prepared to walk the walk too, not just talk the talk - I fight for liberty and the right to offend, always, as Rowan Atkinson said. I agree 100%. Shame on others for not speaking out to defend liberty and freedom of speech INCLUDING the right to criticise, mock, lampoon, deride religion or any belief system.  I'm a proud campaigner against the racist poison of anti-Semitism, always, and a strong supporter of the state of Israel and its right to exist. So there!

I am a member of The Free Speech Union (thanks for their advice always) and AFAF (Academics for Academic Freedom), and, like them, am constantly fighting for the right to freedom of speech and expression (despite some differences especially on their seeming transgender fixation). I am actually on the FRONT LINE of the war for free speech. FREE SPEECH MATTERS. I would defend the free speech of anyone I disagree with too, except when it incites hatred and violence against people. We need MORE free speech, not less. More.

I'm also a member of The Society of Authors and The British Czech and Slovak Association (who kindly awarded my short story The Prague Violin a nice cash prize, a second one for that tale). 

For me, being creative (otherwise known as 'making stuff up'), whether with words or music, is the most wonderful thing in the world. I enjoy nothing more, the buzz of it. And I am good at it too which helps. As far back as I remember, I was inventing stories and characters and creating - it's  instinctive for me. Then honed by years of hard work and dedication - that bit is THE CRAFT to add to the ART which is there in me and other artists innately already.

I ran my own micro-publishing business, TWO FAT CATS PUBLISHING, via which I published three books (I retain full control and copyright as a result; and can see ALL sales information in detail always SO know when reviewers claim to have bought the eBook or page reads and HAVE NOT - I have digital evidence, you see, of all sales, ebook, page reads, dates and locations). Three books is enough. For now.

My well-received collection of poetry, 'The Loved Ones', was published via TWO FAT CATS. Poetry is a minority sport, so sales are small, and most sales are direct from me in paperback, but the poems are out there in the world now for evermore! I know they've been read at memorial services & used in schools, colleges and universities in UK and all over the world (my books always do well in USA, and Scandinavia and Germany. No idea why, but thanks anyway!). Some of my pandemic poems are also in the National Library of Wales Covid archive collection & the Museum of London, & libraries in the USA.

In March 2023, I published my 10th book since 2010: "The Nine Lives of Summer", a real emotional rollercoaster of a crossover adult fiction novel/middle grade children's book in which a main cat character lives through 9 lives & travels to a dozen countries with diverse characters and tales. This cat story will appeal to cat lovers too, not just kids, but they love it too. And MOST people LOVE that story. Love it. It REALLY connects with readers, makes em laugh and, yes, cry. 

My writing always has something to say, and is always full of comedy, (yes, even in my Nazi crime thriller; even my psychowoman cyberstalker novel, yes, even in my Covid poems about death), even if very dark (just watch 'Hamlet' to see the comic scenes). Tragi-comedy. Black comedy. Gallows humour. That is my author voice. Life is absurd, after all. Dark and light, all in the mix, the living landscape.

Definition of my life: making it up as I go along...and trying to enjoy the journey...while hoping for a better destination. NO PASARAN!

1) I met Roald Dahl when I was around 9 in 1977 on a children's holiday (with the Puffin Club). I can't remember a thing he said, though - maybe because he looked so scary and imposing! Six foot four frame, skeletal facial features, sunken eyes with a piercing stare - that sort of thing. I hope he gets a statue in Cardiff soon.

2) Some of my  great uncles were Pontypridd father and son team Evan James (father, a wool merchant weaver like most of my mum's mum's ancestors for 300 years) and his son James James (a weaver and harpist), who wrote the Welsh national anthem in 1856 (Evan wrote the words; his son composed the music). Also, I'm probably a cousin of Horatio (norn Horace) Nelson via my great-great-grandfather Thomas Nelson of Burnham Thorpe - my only known English ancestor who married my grandmother's grandmother in Tanerdi, Wales in the very early 19th century, after travelling from East Anglia to west Wales as a journeyman weaver. So Anglo-Welsh with bells on then! British, I prefer. If the  activists dare touch Nelson's statues, then it's war - and personal! And btw I am in a VERY small minority group, never having got a job or even work experience via a family member - how many people can claim that?

3) My father was arrested by the Nazis in occupied Belgium in the early 1940s. He spent a night in the cells as a slave - in latter stages of WWII, the Nazis under Armaments Minister Speer, started calling up male civlians in the Low Countries for slave labour in mines, factories etc. My father's sister's fiance/husband-to-be managed to get him out and away to the countryside, where he hid and worked on the land, before the British liberated Belgium in 1944. He then acted as PoW interpreter for the British army. He came to England in 1951 and worked for the NHS (why I was born and grew up in Dartford - my dad got a job in a hospital near there). The new Nazi crime thriller I am planning is a war story I have wanted to write for many years - and because of my family, I have 'skin in the game'. The Second World War is my family's 'lived experience'. And my father was a slave - for a day - then an outlaw. A real, live slave. One of many slaves in Nazi Europe until 1945. Forgotten slaves. But liberated by the British just like slaves in 1807.

Sadly now the UK police resemble the pc gestapo, harassing people to suppress freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of artistic expression. SHAME ON THEM. 1984 is here in the UK of 2024.

I am an activist fighting this and a campaigner against police corruption and brutality, esp for South Wales Police. Something must be done... and I am doing it.  I shall be exposing corrupt, violent and dishonest police officers via IOPC complaints and in court, and via the media. Wrongdoers wil be exposed & made to account for their behaviour, such as siding with a proven liar against an innocent individual, no doubt to try and boost their arrest/conviction rates. They will rue the day. I'm like one of those little dogs - when I bite, I never let go. I never give up. NEVER. Not when I know I am right and not when I have been wronged, attacked, abused by bullies. Watch this space in 2005/6/7. Truth will out. JUSTICE IS COMING.

4) I visited the USSR in early 1979 when I was 11, with a school group - my mum taught Russian for a while at Dartford Girls Grammar School (she taught French there 1963-1980); she even translated Russian schoolbooks for a book called The Russian Version of the second World War (1976). While queueing in Moscow at Lenin's tomb, two Soviet soldiers approached and one pointed a gun at me. Ever so slightly worried (!), I called to my mum who was ahead of me in the queue and asked what they wanted; she told me to empty my duffel coat pockets. I did so, and the soldiers walked away stone-faced when they saw my woolly gloves. They thought I'd been hiding a camera to take a photo of that old waxwork Lenin - strictly forbidden at the time (though cameras went in after Gorbachev was leader). Oh those Russians! - as Boney M sang. Nobody's ever pointed a gun at me since, thankfully. But I GET the Russian mentality in the way most do not, incl those in the Western media.

5) My mother's first cousin (so my first cousin once removed?) was a Mazda lighting company salesman called Tom Jones. He died in a head-on collision on 16 November 1964 (maybe fell asleep at the wheel). The man in the other car (a fibreglass snazzy on-trend TVR sports) died instantly. He was Dennis Spicer, a 29-year-old ventriloquist, pal of Ken Dodd (who has kindly written to me about him). Dennis Spicer was quite a big star then. He had performed at the Royal Variety Performance two weeks before his death (clip on YouTube) and was on the Ed Sullivan show five times between 1962 and 1964. Tragic. I spoke to Sir Ken Dodd about this backstage at Frome Theatre in April 2017. Memories of my meeting with Ken is on page 33 of the tribute book ABSENT FRIENDS (2018). Ken was godfather to Dennis Spicer's son but told me he had lost touch, which is a shame.

6) I am a published songwriter, (and arranger/producer), and in 2014 started writing and recording again after giving up playing music completely for 10 years and songwriting for longer; I hope others can record and perform my songs (I am no performer). I have stopped again now (2022) as it is too expensive. For now. I was a member of Sheffield Indie band Poisonous Little Creatures (1988-1990) until we imploded one night at The Leadmill. Happy(ish) days...

7) I was born at number 52 Denver Road, Dartford, Kent, England - someone called Michael Philip Jagger (later singer of The Rolling Stones) lived on that street at number 39 until he was aged 12 or so, about a decade before my family lived there. Keith Richards lived on the next street, Chastilian Road, above a shop. Mick n Keef left in 1954; my parents arrived 1961. Pop artist Peter Blake, perhaps most famous for doing the Beatles' Sgt Pepper sleeve design, also lived on Denver Road. Also, when I was at Dartford Grammar School (1979-84), I had the same English and Latin teachers as Master Michael Jagger, whose PE teacher dad Joe taught PE at DGS. Rock n roll!

8) My TV debut was in 1978 when I was on Songs of Praise (at the time I was a choir boy at the ancient Holy Trinity church in Dartford town centre - which, frankly, was for me a solely mercenary activity and nothing to do with a love of religion or even music, at that age). I also remember watching, aged 6 or 7, Michael Crawford filming Some Mother's Do Have Em (back in the days TV comedy was funny) in Sheerness, Isle of Sheppey, Kent - in the one where Frank Spencer has a driving test and ends up driving off a jetty into the sea. TV is a monster... I spent a lot of my childhood holidays on a caravan site in Sheerness, now a Tesco carpark, and fished for sticklebacks in the Napoleonic era moat. As a small boy, until 1820 or so, Charles Dickens lived across the moat in Blue Town (socalled as Navy paint 'liberated' from the docks by workers to paint their houses...) Dickens references the marshes along the coast at Minster (where we used to go cockling) in Great Expectations, and Magwitch is based on a real convict from a real prison ship anchored there. History...

9) I was mentored by the late great comic writer David Nobbs, (writer of Reggie Perrin TV series and books, and so much else too), who I met first in 2009. He read my first novel Crump and said:

"I think you write very well and there's some beautiful satirical stuff"; "I think you create some really good and really funny characters, and you write very good dialogue." Wow! I mean, just, WOW!

He also gave constructive criticism which I deeply appreciated - if you're going to have your work critiqued, then having one of the very best comic writers (of novels and TV sketches) of the last 50 years do it isn't half bad. Always get the best!

Of A Cat Called Dog he said: "I did appreciate the quality of the writing and there were some very funny jokes. 'Missing, presumed fed.' Brilliant." He explained he didn't like animal books - only Winnie the Pooh - and encouraged me not to "abandon people books" for cat books. So I won't. And I haven't! For better or for worse.

As a patron of the British Humanist Association, David Nobbs didn't believe in a fluffy-clouded heaven or life after death. But he was wrong - because he lives on, not only in the TV comedies and novels that so many enjoy, but also in the many writers - like me - that he was gracious and patient enough to mentor. He showed a generosity of spirit perhaps rare in those who have reached the very top of their professions - especially TV, an industry well known to turn even the meekest and most pleasant of men (and women) into monsters.

Thank you David. RIP.

10) Oh, and finally, I can never do anything without making a list first! Without one I feel, sort of, listless...