I was born in January 1965 - not in a hospital but in a house in Twickenham, Middlesex (as my mother once said, I was ‘home-made’). Since then I’ve lived in Isleworth, Shiplake (near Henley), Hounslow, Shepperton, Upper Halliford, Knaphill (near Woking), and now Camberley. That’s quite a few schools I have listed on Friends Reunited.

Me, aged 5Despite being a bit of a swot and gaining 9 ‘O’ Levels and 3 ‘A’ Levels, I didn’t go to University… I was offered places at Hull and Swansea to read either Biology or Zoology, but I’d had enough of being a poor student by then… and I’ve never really had much of a tolerance for alcohol so I wasn’t suited to student life (I rarely drink now, something the wife is glad of because I always get the driving duties). I wasn’t interested in computers at that point - we did have one computer at Sunbury Six Form College, but it was always surrounded by a bunch of nerds playing a Space Invaders game that they’d written themselves using BASIC (you know who you are guys).

I commenced my working life in Central London, and my first job involved publishing the financial results of gold mining companies (I’m not making this up). My introduction to the industry that now pays my mortgage and finances my wife’s shopping expeditions was through using a computer to do sales statistics analysis for a division of Texaco. My interest gradually developed to the point where I become an IT person rather than a user. Since then I’ve worked for WordPerfect (as it was then), Toshiba, and Emstar (an energy management division of Shell) where I was a Netware administrator and developed applications using Lotus Symphony and Borland’s Paradox Application Language (Borland offered me a job, which I turned down in favour of Lotus Development… see below).

These days I work for the IBM Software Group. Up until the end of 2003 I was the Regional Technical Sales Manager for Lotus Software (covering the UK, Netherlands and South Africa). Following a reorganisation I turned down the new management role I was offered and have moved back to a technical role as a consultant in the Messaging & Collaboration Solutions team. I’m now the Messaging & Collaboration Sales Leader for UK, Ireland and South Africa. I’ve been with Lotus (as was, before the IBM takeover) since November 1991, starting in Customer Support, supporting 1-2-3 (for Windows and DOS… remember DOS?), Symphony and Approach. After holding the position of Team Leader, I moved to Corporate Sales as a Systems Engineer in October 1994.

Me, more recentlyIn October 1997 I moved to UK Technical Sales (to specialise in Domino web application development and security), and became manager of the Lotus Technology Advocate team in January 2000. I was promoted to the position of UK Technical Sales Manager in April 2001, and then became the Regional Technical Sales Manager in June 2002.

And in my spare time…? Hey, I don’t get any spare time. I don’t get to see Arsenal as often as I’d like to any more, but I don’t mind because now I spend time with my lovely wife Maria and my gorgeous daughter Lauren. I like gardening (but only in the Summer) and I don’t like DIY. I dabble in magic, and on a clear night you may spot some idiot in my back garden peering through the eyepiece of an astronomical telescope. When I’m in the car, I’ll be listening to the Smashing Pumpkins, Incubus, the Foo Fighters, XTC, the Beatles, Radiohead or Supergrass… usually so loud that I won’t hear the mobile phone ring. I hardly ever listen to the radio because the stations play too much crap.

Talking of music, in my late teens and early twenties I played bass guitar with a few bands, the most notable being ‘Heaven Can Wait’ - we played at the Rock Garden (in Covent Garden) and the Hammersmith Palais a few times, and our claim to fame was that we supported a band called Furniture who themselves had a Top 20 hit in the UK in 1986. How impressed are you now?