I'm a sixty year-old wildlife ranger at the frequently unpleasant, pointy end of wildlife conservation...A former zoo keeper and Royal Marine (reconnaissance), I'm six feet three inches tall with short, grey hair (by "Gino") and I still have all my own teeth (albeit mostly in a jar in the kitchen cupboard)! I also have one brown eye and one blue (the blue one currently residing in a different jar in the same cupboard)!

I wanted to be a mathematician when I was a boy....that is, until I discovered that there are three kinds of people in this world....those who can count and those who can't! My most notable characteristic would have to be my generally bewildered disposition, coupled with a strong tendency to repeat myself to repeat myself! On the other hand, I do have many talents and I'm convinced that it's only a matter of time before I discover what they are! Sadly, the most interesting thing to happen to me recently was when I was asked by a lady with a clipboard if I could spell the word "Presbyterian". I couldn't, but I guessed and I got it right! She said I was the only person to get it right all day and gave me a sticky badge to put on my T-shirt....Wow! This is a fairly standard level of excitement for my life these days, apart from the fact that I'm now heavily involved with Search and Rescue along with my 16 month-old SAR dog, Tess. We are constantly assessed and, whereas Tess consistently scores nines and tens, I usually only manage to scrape by with a seven or, on a good day, an eight, but then that's only to be expected I guess when I'm working with a canine partner who's at least twenty rungs higher on the IQ ladder than me!

Hobbies include wildlife and landscape photography, maintaining my two UK National Ranger websites, searching for my car keys (usually followed by trying to remember where I parked the car) and writing comedy-style science fiction short stories that generally don't involve the current sci-fi genre obsession with the world coming to a terrible, apocalyptic-type end, unless of course, there are plenty of laughs involved along the way....It's all stuff that's very badly written though I'm afraid....Very badly written indeed!