about

This page has existed in one form or another since 2002. I have just cut most of it.

The original cheerfully listed my date of birth, the hospital I was born in, the schools I went to and the streets I grew up on. I then spent a career in advertising technology, implementing the EU privacy directive at AOL and rolling out GDPR and CCPA compliance at Travix, while all of that sat on a public web page with my name at the top of it. Twenty years of telling other people to think carefully about personal data, and a standing invitation to anyone who fancied answering my bank’s security questions. It seemed a reasonable moment to take my own advice.

So, the shorter version.

I am from Liverpool. I moved to London for university and stayed for the better part of thirty years, despite one determined attempt that involved working at a Quasar centre and a run of parties at my parents’ house for which I owe them a belated apology.

Before the internet got hold of me I worked in bars. I met Danny La Rue, was offered a job running his bar, and decided to move to Soho in roughly the time it takes to read this sentence. After Soho I managed a pub in Putney, which is where a good number of people came to know me as “world”, a nickname I have never entirely escaped and can no longer satisfactorily explain.

Then I joined an internet service provider to train people on software they did not want to learn, which turned into a career in product management running through AOL, a stretch of consultancy, online travel, and now a fashion marketplace. That part is all under experience, in considerably more detail than anyone needs.

Then in 2016 I left a job without another one lined up and spent the best part of a year travelling. The centrepiece was a round-the-world ticket that autumn: London to Miami, then New York, Washington, Palm Springs, Minneapolis, Seattle and Chicago, before crossing the Pacific to Bangkok, Melbourne, Wellington and Sydney, and home in time for Christmas. Tokyo at New Year and a month in India in the spring took care of most of the rest. Forty-seven cities and sixteen countries, all told.

My working theory, tested fairly thoroughly, is that you learn more about a place by wandering its neighbourhoods and staying with people who live there than by queueing for its landmarks. If you ever notice the gap between one job ending and the next one starting, that was it, and I would recommend it.

It ended in the Netherlands, a country I had first fallen for as an Erasmus exchange student in Tilburg twenty-odd years earlier. The actual decision got made over a beer on Rembrandtplein, where it occurred to me that the least complicated way to stay longer would be to find a job here. I answered an advert, had an interview a week later, and have been in Amsterdam since September 2017.

I wrote about the move at the time, in a piece that now survives only in the Internet Archive, which is fairly typical of this website. Most of it holds up. Amsterdam still has the good parts of London without the rat race, I have entirely adjusted to biertjes instead of pints, and I remain quietly astonished by the sheer quantity of fried food. I also cycle everywhere, which I would never have done in London.

I still get bored partway through things, which I have always blamed on arriving several weeks earlier than scheduled, and I still go out more often than I update this website. The evidence for both is scattered across the internet in the wreckage of about thirty dead social networks.

If you want the full inventory of accounts I have opened and abandoned since the late nineties, that is its own page, and it is mostly a graveyard.

Mine’s a vodka and Sprite.