About Me

I love writing. And I love meeting the people who give me stuff to write about. But it wasn’t until I quit my first post-university job in PR that I decided to do something about it.

Previously, I had obtained a First Class Honours degree in Communications and Society from the University of Leicester (1996). Funnily enough, this was a study of the ways in which our various media maintain the status quo through story selection and delivery – a “how not to” guide - but it further fuelled my interest in the media.

After six months in Covent Garden, I left and briefly embarked on a conversion course to set me on the road to becoming a barrister – an adolescent pipe dream.

But I soon turned to an earlier childhood ambition – journalism - and gained a Post-graduate Diploma in Journalism from De Montfort University, achieving a distinction.

Immediately afterwards, in 2000, I was lucky enough that a stint at work experience at the Leicester Mercury’s Niche Media unit resulted in a job offer and six subsequent years of richly varied work.

I worked in news reporting for the weekly freesheet, The Mail, and as the department’s work took on a more commercial nature, I began writing, laying our and designing advertising features, while at the same time keeping my hand in at independent editorial writing through regular restaurant reviews, compiling the Leicester Mercury’s weekly Weekend Hot 100 page, and, best of all, taking editorial charge of a now-defunct monthly lifestyle publication, Top Banana.

This magazine was the thing I loved working on most, despite a non-existent budget. When it came to getting clothes for each month’s fashion shoot, it was a case of calling in favours with local clothing retailers. But working with a highly-talented photographer, Darren Cresswell, (voted London Fashion Week photographer in 2006), it was rewarding and fun, in equal measure (apart from the time we came face to face with a groundkeeper armed with a shotgun, but that’s a different story!)

I left the Leicester Mercury in 2006 to go travelling around New Zealand and Australia for six months. What an exhilirating experience! I was based in Auckland for my Kiwi leg of the journey, staying with an old school friend, but visited the Bay of Islands, Rotorua, Milford Haven, Franz Josef Glacier, Wellington and, best of all, Queenstown, where I went skiing and jumped out of a plane at 15,000 feet. Not an experience I am desperate to repeat (see my written account of that particular adventure in the editorial section of this site.

My Australian base was, rather predictably for a Pom, Bondi Beach, Sydney, but I travelled about, visiting places including Alice Springs, Ayer’s Rock, the Whitsunday Islands, Brisbane, Fraser Island, Hervey Bay and a sizeable chunk of the east coast, taken in with two friends and, most challengingly, two one-year-olds.

Following a brief stop-off in Singapore, I arrived home last February and set about starting my own business. Having only worked in three different companies, it was pretty daunting setting up on my own.

A year down the line and I wouldn’t change it for a thing. I’m lucky enough to have clients that I communicate and connect with extremely wel. Between them, they all bring me a varied and challenging working week. Just take a look at the rest of my site and you’ll see what I mean.

Some of the work – particularly sales letters - is of a confidential nature, so cannot be displayed here, but I think my site gives a pretty good all-round flavour of what I’m about.

Here’s to another year!