When I’m not teaching – or marking C&G assignments for WEA courses – I spend what time I can reading, writing, playing guitar.

I was a semi-professional musician for a while, touring the country with a variety of performances: Brechtian-drama, live accompaniment to silent cinema films, folk-hero-homage: I still sing the songs of the late, great Jake Thackray at any time, to anyone who’ll listen…

I published a book of poetry in 2009, and then started butterfly-flitting off on to yet more diverse (and perverse?) projects for a while: teaching Song-writing, and intergenerational-Drama; giving talks; working in schools as a ‘creative practitioner’; learning to play a Bach cello-piece on guitar…

I’m back on the poetry again, now: working on a 21st-Century update on Byron’s Don Juan – due for publication in 2014, in time for the 200th anniversary of the publication of the original. It’s going to be good!

I hope you can see from the above that I don’t really do anything I don’t enjoy (!)

… which makes guilty secrets all the more difficult to identify.

It might have something to do with the use of the semi-colon;

or The Only Way Is Essex.

Or midget gems.