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Due to popular* demand, but mostly because I’ve always wanted to be a published author, I’ve packaged up the whimsical comedy stylings of my blog posts into a Kindle ebook. The book, which contains TEN NEW CHAPTERS, is on sale for the ludicrously low price of £0.99 and is available HERE: https://amzn.eu/d/0LdMECt New chapters include…

When I think about the differences between my childhood and the world that my kids are growing up in, there is one facet that would amaze younger me: Being a geek in today’s world is so…normal. The highest grossing films are about superheroes. The biggest TV shows of modern times have storylines based on dragons…

The year was 2001. I had just quit an incredibly stressful job with no other employment prospects on the horizon. In these bleak circumstances, I decided that my best course of action was to jump out of a plane. Maybe I should elaborate a little. In what was a pretty turbulent point of my life,…

I got my first real six-string…as a surprise Christmas present from my folks when I was little. (OK, so maybe not as dynamic an opening line as Bryan Adams, but it’s the truth). Up until that point my sum of musical endeavours had been relegated to percussion instruments at school, usually the final “ting” of…

A book nook? What the fook is a book nook?  A book nook is a hollow book-shaped box – think “chunky Fantasy or Sci-fi saga” thickness (not my usual “no wider than my thumb” rule for novels I will actually read).  This box sits on your bookshelf, and within it you can create a little…

(Now there’s a meta title for you.) For those of you who have read a few of my other posts, you would have spotted a pattern by now; Try a shiny new activity with initial enthusiasm, achieve mixed results, hit a wall and inevitably give up. And so as the gaps between blog entries have…

Chapter 2: The Karate Middle-Aged Man Fast forward from my previous post to about 35 years later… My son was eight years old and I was looking for an activity to get him out of his head and move about a bit more. He had shown no interest in sports, and he was a small…

Chapter 1: The Karate Kid I was six years old and my parents were looking for an activity to get me out of my head and move about a bit more. I had shown no interest in sports, and I was a small and frankly nerdy child. In their infinite wisdom, they decided that learning…

Quite a handful of the previous pastimes I had tried had one thing in common; they were essentially grown-up versions of hobbies that were for kids, such as building Lego models and making things out of clay. It was time to explore an idea more suitable to my age, and maybe something a bit more…”manly”. …

I’ve always had a nagging guilt that with at least some of my spare time, I should be “giving back” to the community at large somehow. Whilst I was more than happy to contribute to other’s charity efforts, I had never led an attempt to raise money or awareness for a cause. Besides, all of…