I began writing for a football Fanzine in the late 1980s, adopting a tongue-in-cheek style that seemed popular with its readers. As my writing further developed, I wrote my autobiography, Once in a Blue Moon, Life Love and Manchester City —the story of a down-trodden, everyday working-class football fan being brought up on a council estate in Wythenshawe in the 1960s and 70s. This became a best seller for its publisher in 2010, and was subsequently reprinted on three separate occasions. Fifteen years later, it remains available to purchase on Amazon.
With this modest success and having achieved my goal of being published, I hadn’t planned on writing anything further. However, having suffered an unexpected redundancy when serving as a Local Government Officer, I grabbed the opportunity to adopt a different approach and took a master’s degree in scriptwriting for television and radio at Salford University, hoping to further develop my creative writing skills that might become fruitful in the future.
‘The Falling Rain’ was the final project for my master’s degree and was originally written as a movie script, of which I soon found out became nigh impossible to attract enough attention. Subsequently, I decided to develop the script into a novel in the hope of moving the project forward. This was an entirely different form of writing, which certainly had its challenges, but I am extremely proud of the final outcome. The post-war 1950s period in Britain is largely untouched in contemporary literature and proved a highly interesting period to research. Throwing a former Nazi soldier into a working-class Manchester housing estate certainly gave my imagination room to run riot.
I have been married for 32 years and have two wonderful daughters. I retain a passion for Indie music and remain a devoted supporter of the mighty Blues.