Profile

"I was born in 1941, my early life being spent in the village of Bluntisham, in Huntingdonshire, on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fens. After Ramsey Abbey Grammar School I trained for the Baptist ministry at Rawdon College, the Northern Baptist College, Manchester and William Temple College, Rugby, being ordained in 1966 and transferring to the United Reformed Church ministry in 1993. Ministry took me around England ending up in Berwick upon Tweed, and involved me with local churches and chaplaincy to industry and higher education. I married Judith in 1968 and we have retired to Chesterfield.

During the course of my ministry I have gained a BA with the Open University, an MA at Birmingham University and an MTh at Heythrop College, London University, my main subject being philosophy. Two figures who stand out for me in the history of Christian thought are Soren Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both Lutherans and both living on the edge in different circumstances. Bonhoeffer appears in two of the poems in this collection.

Since my first in 1980, poems have been published singly and in three self-published collections of my own, with pen drawings by Judith. Our three children are Rebekah, Thomas and Stephen to whom this volume is dedicated."