User Profile

Born in 1971, I grew up in the village of Oxenhope in West Yorkshire, in the heart of Brontë country and a few metres from where the classic film 'The Railway Children' was filmed. I worked in Switzerland from the end of 1989 until the late summer of 1990 in the Kongress Hotel, Davos and the Schweizerhof, Vulpera in the Graubünden canton as a gap year and to really improve my German before starting university.

I attended Coventry Polytechnic (Coventry University as it became during my second year) from 1990 until 1994, studying Modern Languages (German and French, and ab initio Russian). I chose Coventry Poly over Reading University, because Coventry's course was politics and history based and not literature based. During my third year (1992-1993) I studied politics in Potsdam, near Berlin, in the newly-formed state of Brandenburg, three years after the Berlin wall came down; I then went on to study (or not, as the case proved to be) in Grenoble, France - the hottest place in France (regular temperatures of 40 degrees celsius and little breeze, due to its position in the valley of the Alps). On my return from France in July 1993, I met Emma.

In 1994 I left Coventry University with a First Class B.A. Hons in Modern Languages and moved to Grimsby, to be based near Emma, living with my aunt and commuting to Hull University to do a PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education) in order to become a Modern Languages teacher. By the time I qualified as a teacher, I decided against going into the profession and returned to live in Coventry and work at a translation agency in Leamington Spa.

In 1996, I married Emma and we moved into our first house. In 1997, I moved to work at IBM Warwick, making a career change from a languages-based job to an IT job. Spent most of my time there doing Year 2000 fixes in COBOL for insurance systems and then out of the blue was contacted in late 1998 and offered a job as Language Support Manager at a CAD/CAM software company in Coventry, responsible for the management of software translation. This job didn't last long before I drifted into website development and DTP work at the same company.

In 1998, our first daughter, Murron was born, and in 2001 she was followed into the world by Philippa. Our (hopefully) final arrival, and our first boy, was born in April 2008.

I still work at the CAD/CAM company, but things are changing and it is not the same job it once was. Watch this space...

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