My leisure time is very important to me since I always hate the feeling of being unproductive. Needless to say I don't watch much television! At my most indulgent I enjoy a football match - I've been a fan of Aston Villa since I was 7-years old! Well, they wore attractive claret and blue shirts and sounded like they jetted in from Italy every week, while 'Birmingham City' was a drab name for a team in drab colours who never won anything.

The big passions in my life are reading and music.

Oscar Wilde said that "Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes," but it occurs to me that you don't have to learn by your own experiences! I hope that reading makes me a wiser and more broad-minded human being. I've been a compulsive bookworm since University and am now infamous for buying more books than I read! I particularly like studying history, philosophy and theology.

Music is all my Dad's fault! He's played guitar since his teens but never wanted to take it too seriously - even infamously turning down an offer from John Osbourne, pre-Sabbath. So I've been playing guitar from an early age, not very well, but good enough to be in some bands in my youth and to lead worship at church. I found song-writing was an emotional outlet as a teenager and I have a small home recording studio, which I don't use nearly enough and occasionally I am asked to play my own material live.

Hopefully you'll find the benefits of these love affairs in the Multimedia pages of this site!