Born in Oxford, I lived most of my life in central London until I moved to Italy in 2008 with my Italian wife and our two teenage sons. I used to do technical work with computers, mainly for invesment banks, but now I teach English as a foreign language.

As a child I was very bright and loved science and especially maths; I wasn't so keen on people. That led to a rather lonely adolescence, but I had the courage to overcome my shyness and expand my horizons and have now had several careers in different fields and lived in three different countries. I never expected to marry or have children, and I am still rather surprised every time I realise that I have been married for twenty years to an exotic and exciting woman, and have two wonderful musical sons.

I have always enjoyed learning and teaching, and I am greatly enjoying the challenge of improving as a language teacher. It's not obvious that an introvert like me can survive in this job, but I'm doing pretty well - most of my students seem to think so, anyway.

In my spare time I like to study, and you can see that I have done a few Coursera courses, including some quite heavy mathematical ones; I was interested to see whether that part of my brain still works after all these years. In real life, last year I took part in a theatre workshop which was terrific fun. And whenever I get the chance I love to play chess. I'll never be much good at it because I started much too late in life, but I enjoy it and find it fascinating.