The Black Crystal Ball (ePub)

Born in Ashton-Under Lyne in Lacashire (now Tameside) at a date I am not going to disclose for now! I spent a long unsatisfying childhood of broken dreams and promises.

I decided I was going to start work as an apprentice cook, so I started work illegally at the age of fourteen,- still not satisfied, at Walls factory in Hyde in Cheshire. That was during the school holidays. Once the holidays had finished, it was back to school to finish at the age of fifteen.After a brief period of being an apprentice welder at Sturtevant Engineering in Denton I started on my Electrical career and being then a "nearly time-served" electrician, after a 4 year period, I decided to go labouring for the extra money needed.

Having an electronics background as a hobby, I thought it was only natural that I should persue this and when I was 21, I joined the Royal Signals, studied Telecommunications, got married, had two wonderful girls and travelled throughout Cyprus, Germany, England, Gibraltar and Ireland.

I Started a folk group whilst stationed in Laarbruch in Germany, called Penny Farthing. We travelled all over Europe with the group. (Well, Belgium, Holland Germany) I Play G banjo,Tenor Banjo, Guitar, Cittern, Bouzouki, Mandolin, Bass, Tin Whistle, Dulcimer and sitar. Keyboards figured well into my life as I learned to play the piano at an early age, materialising as keyboards in a band.I got my first computer, which was the ZX Spectrum 48K (wow, so much memory!), I started to program in BASIC.

When I left the Army in 1987 - now you can start to put together the clues on age! I started working in Telecomms and later on Data companies like IBM and Lucent Technologies.

I wrote many comedy songs. During the course of my writing career, I have written many thousands of pages of comedy, speeches and commissioned works for other people and their companies and many hundreds of CV's for people looking for work.
So, in effect, my writing has literally helped me through the hard