I am a minion wrangler. I’m irascible and rather snappish, not least because apparently I’m older than I thought. I’m sure I was 25 the last time I checked, but my birth certificate and driving licence claim otherwise. I live in Reading. That’s the original Reading, the one in England, not the one in Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania or Vermont.
I drive a bright blue Mini Cooper S very fast. I love Bruce Springsteen and the Böhse Onkelz, Iron Maiden and Iron & Wine, Rammstein and the Raveonettes; I also love Kate Rusby, Carrie Newcomer, Blackmore’s Night and John Gorka. I play a black cherry Spector bass and a burgundy Rickenbacker guitar very loud through Eden and Vox amps. I take a great many photographs with a Nikon DSLR and several Nikkor lenses, one of which is definitely bigger than a baby’s arm.
I regret daily that I cannot eat breakfast at either Marcy’s Diner in Portland, Maine or the Sunrise Cafe in Soquel, California. I have fourteen tattoos, a shaven head and an as-yet unrequited longing to move to Santa Cruz, California. My heroes are Steve Earle, Henry Rollins and Steve Van Zandt. I believe there’s nothing worth knowing about music which cannot be learned from listening to Little Steven’s Underground Garage and that if you don’t love Creedence Clearwater Revival you have no soul.
I love mafia movies and chick flicks and I’m married to an incredibly cool, beautiful American girl who no longer lives a very long way away. Our domestic soundtrack is the perpetually jingling bells on the collars of our four fabulous cats, of whom one in particular has me firmly under his paw.
I love baseball (I’m a Boston Red Sox fan and I also follow the Colorado Rockies, Oakland A’s, San Francisco Giants and Florida Marlins) and rugby league (Warrington Wolves all the way), I’m a disenfranchised and thoroughly disillusioned former football fan, I believe that rugby union is a profoundly boring game for men too fat and unskilled to play Australian Rules football and I can tell that summer is here because Super League is now has only three realistic contenders, the Red Sox are well into the annual six-month-long sellout of Fenway Park, Brian Sabean is somehow still employed by the San Francisco Giants despite signing garbage every winter and I need some California sun. I’m English by birth, British by nationality, northern by the grace of God and my accent is much cooler than yours.
Oh, and “Шаг вперёд, два шага назад” is the title of a book written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in 1904 in which he discusses the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. No, I’m not a communist. I work in IT. “One step forward, two steps back” frequently sums up life in the industry rather well. The header and background photographs were taken in Big Sur, California.