I was born in Windsor, England in 1960 and was brought up in Bracknell, a "new town" (a euphemism for a soul-less concrete suburban sprawl created in the late 1940s) just outside London. At the age of eighteen, I succeeded in escaping and went to university in Bath (in the west of England), and I've stayed in the area ever since.

Since 1982, I've been living in Bristol - a city I feel very comfortable in. It's big enough to have plenty of cinemas, bookshops, theatres and general attractions, old enough to have plenty of history, charming enough to have a great waterfront and dockside eateries but small enough that the countryside is only a short walk away. It's a friendly and cosmopolitan city, too - and by and large, everyone seems to get on pretty well with everyone else. My own street, in South Bristol, is a heady mix of born-and-bred Bristolians, students, gay yuppies (I was going to say "like myself", but I'm probably too old to count as a yuppie now, and I have a small Nissan Micra instead of the mandatory Volvo, 4x4 or BMW), and a large Italian community - and we all get on pretty well as neighbours!

Having been a dyed-in-the-wool workaholic anorak for many years - I've worked in the computer industry since I graduated in 1982 - I've recently "downshifted." This rather grand (and currently fashionable) term simply means that I don't work as hard any more. Although I've always enjoyed my job and taken my career seriously, it's only been in the last few years that I've realised that there's more to life than work - there's a whole universe out there waiting to be experienced, and it's easy to miss it when you're working flat out. I now work about 25 hours a week for a company called Reality Consulting Limited, of which I'm one of several directors. The rest of the time I spend walking, camping, travelling, reading, doing T'ai Chi, entertaining and cooking (I'm vegetarian), talking, meditating, cycling, experiencing the Qabalah, studying astrology, delving into obscure languages (Welsh, Hebrew, Basque, Esperanto - but despite a life-long interest in languages, I'm not fluent in anything other than English), arguing the toss with friends till the early hours of the morning, and discussing subjects that I was brought up to consider taboo (politics, religion and sex).

My particular quest - if that's not too strong a word - is to wander in that twilight world that attempts to reconcile science and spirituality. My mother was psychic, and my father a scientist; I've always had a strong scientific leaning academically, and graduated in Mathematics with Computing. I personally have never seen any real conflict between my spiritual beliefs and my interest in science. Since some of my spiritually minded friends think I place too much reliance on science and not enough on faith, and some of my hard-core reductionist scientist friends think I'm a tree-hugging new-age loony, I'm hoping I've got the balance about right!