16 Things

I’ve never really got to grips with memes and tags, but Ali Karim has asked me (along with various others, including Mike Stotter of Shots Magazine), to highlight 16 little-known facts about myself. I would normally be desperate to come up with some excuse to avoid doing this, but Ali is such a great guy - and I do already owe him a pint or three - that I’m glad to oblige. But then, the awful challenge is to come up with 16 morsels of info that do not immediately characterise me as Britan’s Boringest Blogger. How interesting these bits and pieces are, I’m dubious, but here goes.

1. I was born in Knutsford, the Cheshire town which was the basis for Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, and to this day the law firm I’m a partner in has an office in the town.

2. The first time I wrote about crime fiction, I was seven years old. I recorded in my school book that I’d enjoyed an episode of ’77 Sunset Strip’ called ‘The Chrome Coffin.’ The teacher needed to correct my spelling of ‘chrome’, though.

3. A Team for all Seasons is the title of the book written by my father about the local football club of which he was a passionate supporter and ultimately President. It took him ten years to write and was published shortly before his death. It ran to over 400 pages. Quite an achievement for someone who left school at 14 and had little formal education. He consulted me regularly about his writing, but routinely disregarded my advice – and the book was all the better for it.


4. After I left school, I had what is now known as a ‘gap year’. I spent three months unemployed (it was the era of the miners’ strike, daily power cuts and the three day working week) and then six months working in a factory that made yogurt. Surely this was the least exciting gap year ever. But it certainly made me appreciate university.


5. Balliol, the Oxford college where I studied law, was also the college of those great fictional detectives Lord Peter Wimsey and John Dickson Carr’s Dr Gideon Fell.

6. I saw the Beatles in person when I was about eight years old and many years later carried out legal work for the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where they were discovered.

7. My first book was published in 1983 and rejoiced in the title of Understanding Computer Contracts. Racy, huh?

8. Three years after that, I published a book called Managing Redundancies. Unfortunately, it has again become a very topical subject. In recent years, my book on equal opportunities has reached its fourth edition.

9. Magazines I’ve written for include such action-packed titles as Car Mechanics (though I barely know how to open my car's bonnet), Practical Woodworker (there is nobody less practical than me), and Good Housekeeping (I'm deplorably untidy). I was legal correspondent for those legendary publications Social Services Insight and The Expatiate at different times, and spent 18 months writing leader articles for The Solicitors Journal - an excellent opportunity to pontificate on anything that appealed to me (a bit like blogging!)

10. My first fiction success was with a short story that won the Southport Writers’ annual competition, judged by the fiction editor of Bella, a women’s magazine which duly published it. It later appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. After that, there was no stopping me….

11. My methods of coping with stress are listening to music and, less obviously, shopping (but not in a supermarket.)

12. I once gave a lecture to a group of international lawyers in the unlikely setting of the Salzburg castle where much of ‘The Sound of Music’ was filmed.

13. My favourite sport is cricket, but currently my clients at work include Liverpool Football Club and the Football Association.

14. Although I tend to take the Edith Piaf line on regrets, I do regret never learning to play the piano. But when I was a student, a song I’d co-written was recorded on an album by an Italian musician and I was featured in the pop column of ‘The Oxford Mail’. (Someone currently selling the album on eBay describes it as ‘unusual’….) One of my neighbours now is Ian Brown, a rock musician formerly of the Stone Roses, but I have not been brave enough to tell Ian about my past life as a songwriter.

15. The first pop music concert I attended was by Dionne Warwick, in 1976, and the most recent was by…Dionne Warwick, last year.

16. A phrase that crops up several times in my novels is: ‘Life is short’. Something I strongly believe.