I have never been especially comfortable standing still. Over the years, work, painting and writing have taken me in different directions, but each has grown from the same instinct: to make something, solve something or tell a story.
This is not a formal biography. It is simply a little about the three parts of my life that continue to shape what I do.
They did not happen in neat chapters, and one has often influenced another. These are simply the facts as I have lived them.
Business gave me the opportunity to build, change and occasionally begin again. I have spent much of my working life creating companies, solving practical problems and bringing people together around an idea.
The technology mattered, but the people, relationships and trust mattered more.
Painting has always offered a different way to remember a place or a moment. Travel, colour and observation become the starting point, but the finished canvas is never intended to be a literal record.
It is my attempt to hold on to how something felt.
Writing began with the people, humour and stories I knew through cricket and life in Scotland. Those memories eventually found their way into the fictional village of Auchanard and a five-book series.
The village may be invented. Many of its instincts are not.
I do not need to explain it for the reader. A business idea, a painting and a novel may look unrelated, but each begins with curiosity and develops through the simple act of making it real.
The connections appear naturally as the work and the stories unfold.
“Life has given me plenty of stories. I am simply trying to tell them as honestly as I can.”
