bio

Call me what you like, and I am sure many have done and still do call me a grumpy old git, although I don’t particularly care about that reputation. I’m me, I can be fun apparently and witty sometimes although being called the latter recently I had to stop and let that sink in. When you have been a serious person all your life it takes you by surprise when others see that in you.

 

My serious identity as an outsider was originally in part, developed by terrified parents who would not let me go out with my peers, because of my juvenile epilepsy, which was managed by lethal doses of phena-barbitones prescribed from the age of seven to fourteen. These medicines really slowed me down and both my burgeoning gayness and my over protective parents sealed my early teenage years in a cocoon of quarantine. Ironically, this led to me developing a powerful self-reliance and a strong creative mind. I began in my isolation to paint and at twelve years of age to read international Classical novels: Tolstoy, Chekov, Balzac, Maupassant, Turgenev, Alarçon and the whole gamut of English novelists ranging from Sir Thomas More to Charles Dickens and Aldous Huxley.

 

The stopping of the drugs when I was fourteen pushed me violently forward into a new creative life, suddenly filled with energy and hope. It was like a light switch was turned on and I could see what lay ahead for me for the first time, instead of inhabiting the dreamlike state engendered by the written works I had been focussing on before.

 

Following a stint as an office boy straight from school, yes me an office boy, can you imagine! It was some six years in, that I joined a theatre group and worked backstage,.Apart from one disastrous appearance on stage in an Agatha Christie play. I vowed never again, although in my thirties, I did appear as a dancer at the Royal Albert Hall. I had previously undertaken some Higher Education in London where I studied technical theatre and design. The result of this was a few years designing shows on the London fringe and even the occasional opera and also in my leading multi-media workshops across London for people with learning difficulties and mental health issues. I have decades of creative experience, and this coupled with self-development practices that I have followed, I am perfectly placed to support others in finding their metier.

 

I am now a screenwriter, having written and published poetry, a novel, children’s books, non-fiction works and plays. I’ve even recently written lyrics for songs and will be facing my bete-noire by singing two or three tracks myself. I cannot tell you how terrifying this is to me.

 

I find the process of helping others to be the purest form of creativity, anything from how to move forward with a business idea to reflecting on what a person truly desires in life, to helping kids to make pizzas and even older people with dementia get back to themselves, however briefly, through the use of memory boxes and music. 

 

I have a dogged approach to creativity,.

just try stuff!

 

That’s been my motto always and one which I believe my Creative Journey echoes.