Bio… as it is
Well, most personal sites have a bio written in the third person: “So and so was born to be famous…” I suppose this either means that that person happens to be is either famous/rich enough to have someone write for them, or they are just pretending to be rich/famous enough to have someone write for them. I am not rich/famous, and no one will write my bio page, and I don’t want to appear pretentious — it just comes out that way…
I was born in Colorado in 1984. I grew up not far west of Pueblo in a strange community called Pueblo West. It’s a sort of, ‘We’re not actually Pueblo’ community. ‘We can’t pronounce it like real Puebloans can.’ Unfortunately for my parents, I wasn’t meant to live in the desert, so raising me must have been difficult. I spent most of my time pretending to be somewhere green and pleasant, which is why I now reside in England. (That and the English wife, I suppose.) A lot of the fuel for this green, rainy world came from a powerful love of reading which my parents both instilled in me through the simple means of both loving books. By the time I was ten, I was always waiting for my folks to finish their latest books, so I could get on with whichever series it happened to be. (They seemed to think it fair that they — having bought the books — got to read them first). Colorado, for my English reader, is a state roughly the size of the UK and is half mountains and half wasteland. Some of my fondest memories were traveling the short distance from arid beige to glorious vantages of splendor. Many words have been put together to describe Colorado’s mountains, but all of them together wouldn’t describe them by half!
From about the age of seven, I began to find school boring. My parents decided that I needed a challenge so they set about investigating the means for me to skip the third grade. For my part, it was dead easy because in the States until around sixth grade, every year seems to teach basically the same thing. They call it review, and it’s meant to provide a solid foundation. To me, it was a case of: “Yes. That’s all very well, but I can remember for more than ten months at a time, and don’t need to learn that again.” At least that’s how my parents interpreted my boredom at school. Not doing homework was a cry for help–the boy needs a challenge. They were probably right, but I didn’t really mean it as a cry for help… I was just bored. Much more interesting was reading real history books! In the end, I was taught at home until I had finished the curriculum at 16.
Before all that, I was given the incredible gift of percussion. When I was younger, I was “strong willed”, which is a psychologically-sound way of describing a stubborn ass. I decided that I was going to be a drummer. For one year, I think possibly to the day, I harangued my Mom and Dad to let me become a drummer. They finally agreed and bought me a practice pad. A practice pad is a horrible, spirit-crushing invention which looks like a drum head on a stand and is designed to emit no noise whatsoever. The deal was, if I played that for a year, they’d buy me a proper drum. Fortunately, this soulless, round pad came with lessons. I received instruction with a local drummer for several years. He was incredibly patient to teach a six-year-old to hit a round piece of plastic rhythmically for so long. After one year, I was bought a snare drum. It was an old Ludwig, and my parents were grossly overcharged for it, but it was a step in the right direction. Ironically, I found the drum so loud that I usually played it with a big rubber disc over the head to aviod flinching every time I hit it. I progressed to playing at a local school–to which I went for music and no other classes–and at my church. I learned to play the Djembe, and have been entranced with rhythm ever since.
Alongside the getting bigger bit of my childhood was the introduction to me of Faith. Taught through regular attendance at our family’s church (Calvary Baptist Church), I was well-equipped with doctrine and spoke fluent Christianese language. It took me a long time to recover. What really taught me Faith, was my parents’ vision of God being present in their lives. They actually lived as if God cared about what they did. It was a natural progression from their believing so strongly to my accepting God as a primary facet of my life.
I am still finding out that it works the other way round, and that it’s God who does the choosing.
When I was thirteen, I spent a couple of weeks in Juarez, Mexico. I was exposed for the first time to life outside the United States. Just opposite El Paso, Texas is the huge expanse of squalid border-town that is Juarez. Its impoverished population of several million stared over the Rio Grande (at this point, a dark, dirty trickle in a concrete colvert) at what must be the most affluent area of El Paso. I saw people live in houses built from pallets and tires whose children’s teeth rotted from drinking Coca-cola and the water was not safe to drink. I experienced open sewers and flea-bitten dogs and kids. We did puppet shows for children in a square and felt pretty good about ourselves for having taken the time out of our lives to make the effort.
I spent the next three years working summers for the organization which sent us there and learning that what Christians call ‘Mission’ is more about giving back than giving out.
For two summers I worked at a retreat camp near Trinidad, Colorado. It was surrounded by mountains and full of strange Christians. I loved it. I met people from all over the world. This is an anthropological experience to many Americans, and, looking back, I can’t help but think they all thought we were laughably ignorant (I think some of them did laugh, actually). I learnt a lot about Christianity there, but more importantly, I learned more about the majesty of worship. It is a counter-cultural thing to worship now–to tell someone they are worth your time to the point of giving up all else. I have been learning that it is an integral part of humanity. Giving up time for something more important and powerful is something we do naturally. The frightening thing about this trait is that it requires absolute trust, and can be misplaced.
When I was 17, after a devestating church-split and moving to Calvary Chapel Pueblo, I began saving up for a six-month training course in Scotland. Throughout that time, I had been playing in the church band and working for the Solid Ground Cafe. Solid Ground was the church’s beautiful coffee shop and kiosk at the local university. I worked behind the Kiosk, manned the cafe and organised promotions for live music on weekends. It was the “coolest job in the world!” as my wife said the other night when I was reminiscing about it. Imagine a 16-year old hanging out behind the bar at a cafe in a local university providing extraordinary quantities of caffiene to scholars and reading books from the university book shop! It began a lifelong habit of espresso and good company which I am never going to quit.
Exactly 11 days after 11 September, 2001, I flew for the first time. Nervous of the armed police but petrified of the plane, I boarded an AirCanada flight to Toronto. My practiced air of nonchalance disolved into what can only be described as a rictus of fright as the plane took off. I had always been afraid of heights–acrophobic , I liked to say when a prattish teenager. Three hours later I landed in Toronto to have my bags given back to me and told to walk 600 yards to another carousel and deposit them. Nine hours after that, and I was catching my first euphoric glimpses of the most stunning sight I had seen: Scotland. I loved Glasgow airport. I loved Glasgow car parks, shops, cafes (shit coffee and all) and tartan shops. I found Glasweigens the most amazing people on earth. Americans really should get out more!
For six months I learned Scottish dialect. I had to, because I was surrounded by it and for the first three weeks I kept having to say: “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that” and being completely baffled when asked “Where d’ye stay?” I also spent six months learning more about God.
Most of what I learned was by way of struggling with the system of the school. I didn’t like the doctrine, and found it difficult to be around people who were ‘believers’ but were so different from myself. I fought internally to the point of tears. It was a valuable series of lessons, and can only be learned through coming up against your own inconsistencies and letting your foundations settle down again.
It was at this time I met my now wife, Wendy. I had never had a girlfriend, and had never dated. I knew after several months of late-night talks and through opening up to this amazing girl, that I never would. Wendy and I made plans for me to visit her house in St. Albans, and she made plans to fly out to the desert and experience America. It was only during my visit at the end of my six months in Scotland, that we discovered there was no way we weren’t going to be together. That summer we were engaged. Through over a year of trans-Atlantic correspondence and expensive phone calls, we got to know each other more and were married at St. Pauls in 2003. (I should point out that’s St. Pauls church in St. Albans, and not the slightly more well-known pile at the top of Ludgate hill.)
I moved to the United Kingdom in 2003 at the age of 19 to embark on a strict regime of losing my accent at Kings College London. I took the course: “English Language and Communications”, which turned out to be a degree in applied linguistics, and now hold a BA(hons) in same.
Realizing that this is now the third document page length of this bio, I will leave it there for now. I now live in Hertfordshire, and work full-time for a media and events management company as a New Media Executive. I attend Markyate Baptist church and consider myself less equipped for life than I did when I was seven, and think that that’s probably a good thing!
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