I'm a poet and short storyist these days. I was born in Middlesbrough and spent much of my childhood on the North East coast. When I was nine, my father built me a small boat and urged me to row it out to sea.

In a school report, my English teacher called me a ‘debonair dilettante’. My parents looked it up and still didn’t understand it.

In 1970, the members of my university college Junior Common Room voted me Man Least Likely to Make 30.

I left with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics, and disappointed my family by joining a rock band. Despite touring regularly with Genesis and Lindisfarne, the band disappointed the record-buying public and after a spell as a music journalist, I moved to Amsterdam as a record company executive at Phonogram.

I returned to London to become a professional skateboarder, then in my alter ego as Bengt Maelstrom, the editor of Skateboard Scene magazine.

When I met a drunk art director at the launch party for a highly-questionable cookery book called The Rude Food Guide, I was so impressed by his salary that I decided to have a crack at advertising. Armed with a single example of my work, a short story entitled The Day that Mrs Osmond Cried, I landed a job with a London agency (only because, I later learned, the company band was short of a guitarist). We were called Hammersmith Grit and we were terrible. Inexplicably though, we played in Hyde Park before a crowd of 250,000 at the Queen’s Jubilee concert.  

An editor friend encouraged me to write and there followed a number of books on implausibly disparate subjects, including the R&B band The Animals, ultra-marathon running in the Sahara, diving with Tiger Sharks in South Africa, and a history of Northern Soul. And as far as I know, Literature’s only accountancy thriller, Accrual World.

For years, I wrote mildly comedic monthly columns about two of my interests, for Diver and Runners’ World.

With the birth of my daughter I tried my hand at children’s fiction. Surreally, I won the Independent/Scholastic Children’s Story of the Year competition and was forced to drink champagne at Groucho’s with Andrew Marr. I subsequently wrote about twenty children's books for the 'first reader' audience, mostly published by OUP and Hachette.

I caught up with my English teacher from school days after 45 years. He made me write a poem a week for a year, as long as he did too. Our collaboration led to Gap Year, which won the Sentinel Poetry Book Prize in 2014. I've since produced and self-published five 'solo' collections.

More recently, I collaborated with the astonishing trompe l’oeil artist Paul Czainski on The Beanpole Chronicles, an extravagantly produced volume charting the career of Major Stilton Beanpole, the first person to cross the Atlantic on stilts.

I am a mitra (friend) of a Buddhist community and until quite recently worked as a chaplain, teaching meditation to prisoners in the East of England.

My one-man show, The Stand-Up Tragedy Tour, bewilders audiences with a mixture of poetry and anecdotes from an ill-spent youth (and middle-age and beyond).

Sadly, however, my only qualification for immortality is the legendary advertising campaign for Um Bongo, (They drink it in the Congo).