About me

I’ve been doing what I do for over 10 years, but before that I did other things, quite unrelated to writing.

In the mid-Nineties I enjoyed a year or two temping at various companies both in central and suburban London, before spending five years in full-time employment at a City insurance company, where I was responsible for software training, technical IT support and some business analysis.

Before that, I gained a degree in mathematics with subsidiary modern languages (Italian and Russian) at the University of Warwick, in Coventry.

And before that, I was raised and educated in Cardiff, where I was born to Italian parents, on the Prince of Wales’s 20th birthday, in 1968.

I enjoy: Everybody Loves Raymond, dark chocolate, a spot of tennis against a slightly inferior opponent.

I don’t enjoy: soap operas, cream, dentists, watermelon.

I can: ask for a beer in several European languages, sometimes solve the Guardian cryptic crossword, waggle my ears.

I can’t: drive, sing, whistle, or say ‘economist’.