Who am I ?
Good question that and the answer is that I'm damned if I know.
I can tell you where and when I was born, where I went to school, some of the things I learned. I can tell you what I studied at University, what jobs I've done, where I've been and where I'd like to go.
But who I am ?
Tricky.
Maybe we'll come back to it later. Lets get some of that boring biographical stuff out of the way first. I was born in Bilston, England, on the ninth of April nineteen fifty seven. I couldn't tell you what time precisely as I wasn't paying all that much attention when it happened.

I spent my early years living in a large house - well half of a large house actually - that had been divided by building a wall down the middle of it. We didn't own it we rented it, and it probably wasn't as large as I remember. I was a lot smaller then. It must have been fairly big though because when they finally pulled it down they built a whole housing estate where it had stood.

I attended (embarrassed though I perpetually am by the name) Daisy Bank Primary School followed by Bilston Grammar School followed by Birmingham University.
My how the years fly by when you sum them all up in one sentence.
I did a lot of Maths at school because that's what my teachers thought I was good at and as surely as toothache follows chocolate cake I went on and did some more Maths at University.
To be strictly accurate I did as little Maths as I could get away with at University. Instead I chose all the computer courses. This was in the days when a computer was big enough to fill your living room and was programmed by punching holes in paper tape or card.
That sentence on it's own has sent the years spinning away rather worryingly !
I got a job programming computers. Then another one and another. Then I became a programmer/analyst and then (for no more money but with a definite shift of emphasis) an analyst/programmer.
Finally I was just an analyst. No more of that boring programming stuff for me.
That's how it went right up to the point where I quit to spend a year travelling and writing. That was supposed to take about nine months followed by a spell trying to write a book. Well it did take nine months and I did try to write a book. Actually I wrote a book but I couldn't find anyone who wanted to publish it and the multiple copies of the various drafts of the manuscript are now gathering dust in my wardrobe. Oh well. Nobody said life was perfect. After that I had a spell working in a call centre before I quit that job too and took off again - this time through Europe, the Middle East, China, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.  When I came back I spent a while doing short contracts in boring administrative jobs and then took a course in teaching English. A brief period teaching kids at Harrow Summer School has been followed by teaching refugees and asylum seekers in Birmingham
I'm currently considering posts in Japan for next year.
I'll keep you posted if I take one.

Well there it is, the potted biography and if this were a question on a form that would be that. It isn't though. I've tried to stop defining myself by what I do. The twenty two years that I've spent in various computer departments has no more to do with who I am than my liking for cheddar cheese and my loathing of celery does. Rather less in fact.

How about that for a method then ? Maybe I can define myself by the things I like and the things I don't like. Let's give it a shot.

Likes: cheddar cheese, the Doors, sci-fi Movies, Discworld, Escher, Dali, Magritte, Sherlock Holmes stories, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, pizza, chilli, Trans Siberian Orchestra, beer, more beer, hiking, pub quizzes, fifty percent of modern art, travel magazines, rock music, The Reduced Shakespeare Company, writing, camping, books of quotations (as if you couldn't tell !), and of course the big one - TRAVELLING.

Dislikes: celery, any dance group masquerading as a musical act (i.e. everything in the charts in this bold new century), most television, westerns, bird-watching, Karaoke, gardening, beach holidays, fifty percent of modern art, pub singalongs, dancing, commuting, all the big bad things like poverty and injustice (without meaning to sound pompous), all the little bad things like misused apostrophe's (sic) and people ringing up to sell me double glazing.

Well was that a success? I don't think so, but who am I to judge?  It says a little more about me but it still doesn't get to the core of who I am.
Maybe it's an impossible task. Maybe the fact that I've attempted it at all says more about me than anything else. What can I say ?
The defining factor of anyone's life isn't what they've seen it's how they have reacted to it - not what they've done but why.
Now THAT did sound pompous and what's worse I don't even think I was quoting. Having failed to answer the question I'll leave you with one last quotation - another fairly pompous one - from history's most quoted figure, Oscar Wilde.

"The true perfection of man lies not in what man has but in what man is."

Now bugger off and look at the rest of my site. It's full of pretty pictures of exotic foreign lands. You'll like it. Trust me - it's not all as boring as this page.