A Bit About Me

Having an “About Us/Me/It/Whatever” page on a blog or website seems to be de rigueur these days.

So where to start? The beginning’s a good place I suppose. I graced this world for the first time in May 1954 (you can work out my age from that). My childhood and youth were largely uneventful, except for those events that occurred during my childhood and youth such as teething, haircuts and puberty which, apart from the last, were relatively forgettable.

These formative years saw the initial development of my main hobbies - music and gardening. Posing for a photograph in front of a patch of shrubbery which concealed a body (of the dead variety) was a one-off event which didn’t develop into a hobby.

I learned the basic skills of gardening: watering, lawn care, digging …..

I wasn’t that successful at animal training so a circus career was out of the question.

So I was put to work cleaning the garden path.

And, in time, I earned enough to pay the rent on a little plot of my parents’ garden to call my own.

The end of this formative period, as I hit the grand age of 18, allowed me to indulge in my other great hobby - consuming voluminous quantities of Southern Comfort which, to the consternation of others, I insist on drinking neat.

The leisure of my youth came to an abrupt halt when the school which I’d happily attended for years served an eviction notice and I found myself on the employment market. Some 36 years later, in 2007, I escaped the clutches of local government, in the service of which I’d spend 11 years with individual authorities and 25 years at national level.

The remaining years until my 60th birthday were spent working for myself. I discovered that merely adopting the title of “Consultant” would magically increase my earning potential. I focused on property management, though by luck rather than choice, which afforded a nice mix of a day-and-a-bit a week “on site” and the rest happily working at home.

But I’d always aimed to retire at 60, while I was young enough to enjoy the accumulated fruits of my labours over the years, and I beat my target by six months, happily easing myself into a life of leisure in October 2013, having worked out that another six months’ of work would see me handing over most of my income to the taxman.

So now here I am, enjoying a relaxed existence. Gardening if the weather’s good; reading/blogging/messing about on the web if it’s not. Watching very little TV (though I like a good film of an evening).

And consuming voluminous quantities of Southern Comfort.

Neat of course.

Even if a lot of the plants I grew (more luck than anything else) were taller than I was! It was fun.