User Profile

"When walking, just walk. When sitting, just sit. When being, just be."

So what to say?

I'm 40. I don't remember thinking I'd be forty when I was a kid. I worked out that what age I was going to be in 2000AD because that seemed significant then, but what came after it wasn't. Maybe that's the Cold War for you. But 40 crept up anyway and suddenly, here it is. Having achieved it, I'm not so sure that it's a huge amount different to being in my 30s. Less hair. More confidence. That's not a bad trade off.

I live in London. Having spent my 20s sure that I'd never move here. I'm not not sure I'll ever leave. I work in the centre of London as an IT trainer at a university and live out in the east, allowing me to claim to be in Outer London or Essex depending on who I'm trying to impress.

For fun I go rock climbing and help run a club night once a month. I run a cabaret in Soho because two escapologist friends of mine asked me to get involved, and I love that I can casually say 'two escapologist friends of mine'.

I sometimes worry that I'm turning into the black sheep of the family.

I love travelling around London: having lived in Brighton for 7 years I really appreciate London Transport, even the night buses. I love that I've almost seen a stand up fight about the best way to make salad dressing at 4am and that at King's Cross you can have parallel platforms, one ostensibly running North-South and the other East-West. I think Harry Beck was a genius. I love maps too; they're ways of imagining places I'd like to be. And a map doesn't only have to be a geographical representation of a relationship between places.


I love language; I consider it to be the swingset and slide that my imagination dips and dives through, a playground that keeps me forever young. Tell me a new word and I'll be your friend. Buy me a dictionary of obscurity and you might never get rid of me.

I knew what an interrobang was when I was 12.

I teach IT because I love seeing the joy in someone's eye when they get it, no matter what "it" is. I write because I want to believe that other people can see the world with the same happiness that I can, and I dance because sometimes the shaman who lives inside my heart bursts out and takes over, thumping his feet at a high BPM.

I can't write poetry.

I enjoy life, having taken control of who I am and what I want to be and where I want to live a few years ago, and having seen nothing but good come out of the decision to do so. I enjoy my friends because they challenge me and fulfil me and remind me of why this is a fantastic world.

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