An inability to do sums and a nascent talent to string words together steered me towards journalism - that and the desire to wear a trenchcoat, belted with a knot, just like Bogart.
The life of a daily paper reporter completely fulfilled me and I must have been competent because I won a "Young Journalist of the Year" award. It still, then, puzzles me that I allowed myself to be lured away to become head of public relations at one of the UK's largest car makers. I was happy, later, to move into the more tangible world of marketing and happier still when eventually I was able to sell the company that I partly owned to move to the country and just write.
Ten books and seven novels later I am still at it. Nowhere am I more content than sitting in my studio at the bottom of my Wiltshire garden, among the fairies, looking out on my chestnut trees and the Victorian world of Simon Fonthill.