I am quite ancient and, as I say on the back cover of one of my books, I was born at a time when children were quite happy to play with a piece of string and an apple core and didn’t need all the electronic stimulation available to them nowadays.
I currently live amongst the chalky downs of Dorset, but I consider myself an East Anglian at root because I grew up in a small village just outside Peterborough. In those long-distant, gold-tinged days, there existed a county called Huntingdonshire, and, as an erstwhile native of that tiny shire, I still proudly wear its tie. Oliver Cromwell was born in the county. Katherine of Aragon died there, T S Eliot drew inspiration from a chapel at Little Gidding and Lucy Boston set her Green Knowe books in her own home, the beautiful medieval manor house at Hemingford Grey. Interesting company, don’t you think?
I read English at the local university, Cambridge, and went on to pursue a teaching career, with four very interesting years spent at a school in Athens. Whilst in Greece, I learnt to appreciate the pine-tang of Retsina (although, at first, I compared it to Dettol) and the culinary wonder that is a good melitsanasalata (aubergine salad).
Although I grew up on the edge of the Fens, and they have inspired a number of my poems, I’m afraid that the flatness, and the strong bleak winds in winter, eventually drove me to the warmer climes in the South West. I moved from John Clare country to that of Thomas Hardy and have found pleasure and inspiration in the works of both of those geniuses.
I love folklore and folk music and you can expect to hear about those two subjects regularly in my blogs. I am also an unashamed morris dancer, although it requires something of a superhuman effort these days to climb up the steep slope to the Head of the Cerne Abbas giant on May Morning to dance in the summer. We start dancing at 5-15am!