I was born in Edinburgh in 1948 and lived there until I was 24. My parents' rented " house" was a downstairs flat in a tenement which was built around 1690 and is now a Grade 2 listed building. When I lived there, it was a Grade 10 unlisted slum. My father was a grocer by trade and my mother cleaned richer people's houses for a living. They were loving and caring parents and I had a happy childhood. I married in 1968 and my wife, my son and myself moved to Huntingdon four years later, so I have spent two-thirds of my life in England. My second son was born in 1974.

I qualified as an accountant in 1976 and spent over twenty years counting beans in various guises. In 1993, bored rigid by the work, I left the profession to set up a framing and picture gallery in a village near Huntingdon which I sold on as a going-concern ten years later, retiring in 2003. Since then I have been enjoying life, but doing very little that could be considered creative.

When I turned 70 last year, for better or worse, I took to writing poetry.