About Me

Welcome to my blog!

If you're reading this site, you are almost certainly lost.  Or maybe you're actually interested in what I have to say.  In which case you might want to know a bit more about me...

Having never blogged before, I achieved a modicum of fame/notoriety when I wrote a letter to the BBC taking them to task over (what I perceived to be) a poorly-researched interview of opera star Thomas Hampson on their HARDTalk programme, which goes out on the World Service and the BBC News Channel.  As you might have gathered, I'm a bit of a classical music fan, and appeals to untrue stereotypes really, really irritate me.

Much to my surprise (and probably that of the BBC!) the letter went viral after I posted it online, gathering over 140,000 unique views within the space of a few days and being shared widely on blogs and social media by various well-known figures in the classical music world.  My letter was republished on Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc blog and The Arts Desk, became the subject of a brief opinion piece in at least one UK broadsheet newspaper and an editorial in Opera magazine, and resulted in me being invited to appear on BBC Radio 4.  The full story can be found at my other blog.

When I'm not accidentally writing viral letters, I'm an amateur horn player, even more amateur photography enthusiast (I might upload some of my pictures one day), and full-time disseminator of dreadful puns (if you're really unlucky, I might include a few of them in my blog posts).  I divide my time between Oxford - where I live and work - and London, where I seem to spend most of my time when I'm not in the office.

In real life I'm a trainee patent attorney.  (The standard response to this is "a trainee what?").  Please don't pronounce it "pay-tent", by the way.  That irritates me, and then I might have to write you a letter.

I'm from Yorkshire, but apparently I don't normally sound as though I am.  People's reactions on first discovering this range from outright disbelief to hysterical laughter.  Bizarrely, my Northern accent is stronger when I try to speak French.

I also speak reasonable German and am trying to learn Norwegian (with limited success).

Some of the many orchestras I play in on French horn can be found here, here and here.  I also play tenor horn here.

You can follow me on Twitter here.