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Born in west About the only thing Swinton is
known for is its Rugby League team. Oh, and the Manchester United footballer
Ryan Giggs used to live there – his father was a Swinton rugby professional. Education My early schooling was at Moorside Primary School, Swinton. (Earlier Moorside pupils included the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies - who later wrote a Swinton Jig - and the actor Sir Ben Kingsley.) Got into the prestigious Work My first job on leaving school was as a Post Office overseas telegraph
operator in After transferring to the London office (Electra House, an imposing building on Victoria Embankment which was the hub of the world's telegraph traffic at the time), I helped found a social/support group for gay Post Office workers ... and had fun persuading the various PO Union journals to accept our advertising. Most eventually did, but the relentlessly homophobic Union of Post Office Workers (now known as the Communication Workers Union) refused. Hopefully things have improved since then! After many years in the Post Office and British Telecom (after its split from the Post Office) I took voluntary redundancy and moved into secretarial work, first at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex University, and then part-time at the Economics Department of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. However I haven't been able to work since 1991 after contracting the mysterious illness known as M.E. or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Music I like to play piano
(when I have the energy!), especially jazz/show tunes, and back in my George also helped me get a booking to play piano in a pub in Failsworth for a while, but I was dropped after a few weeks because the landlord considered my stuff too upmarket. Although the regulars seemed to enjoy it! I was also once the resident accompanist for the South Oxhey Saints,
a small amateur theatre group in the When I started work at IDS Sussex, I was thrilled to find that Gordon White, one of the two academics I worked for, was also a keen musician who wrote and produced the Institute's annual staff/student Christmas revues. When he found I had similar interests and enjoyed writing lyrics, he encouraged me to contribute songs to the shows and become part of the "stage band". These shows were the highlight of the year for me! As for listening to music, I especially love the Great American
Songbook (the classic songs of Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Kern, Other Interests For a while I was the editor of Derwen, the newsletter of Ceredigion Green Party, and have run websites for CyFLe Aberystwyth LETS, a local community bartering scheme, and Aber Events, a local gay/lesbian/bisexual social group. I’ve also dabbled in writing computer programs, including CallCheck for Windows, which was
distributed as shareware on the Internet and on magazine cover CDs. It proved
quite popular, and I had registrations from the Back in the 1970s my friend David and I were amateur film-makers. We shot
a couple of Super 8 movies filmed mainly on location around ♫ Click here to download the title song I wrote for The Maltese Budgie! It's in MP3 format (622K), and is taken from the original soundtrack, with guitar and vocals by my one-time workmate and musical collaborator George Blockley. The lyrics are rather silly (how could they not be, with a title like that?), but the arrangement is beautifully done! Family I have two older sisters, both living in the English Midlands. My parents were both Welsh, but there are also family links to |
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