About Me

I was born in Dundee on July 21, 1984. My mum stayed at home to look after me and my dad was doing his PhD at the University of Dundee. We lived in a tiny council flat a few miles away from the uni. After my Dad got his PhD, we moved down to the small town of Grangemouth, on the edge of the Firth of Forth. My earliest interest was astronomy: the stars, moons and planets. I begged my parents to buy me a telescope for my sixth birthday. My love of astronomy is really what got me into physics later on in life (don't laugh).

In 1990, we moved down to London, where we lived for one year. Things didn't go all that well for my parents so we were forced to move back to Grangemouth. Then in 1991, we moved to Oxford where we also lived for a year before moving back to Scotland again. That's life. My mum didn't send me to school until I was six, so I spent the first year being taught by her. She was a teacher by profession, and she taught me the alphabet herself and by the time I started school I could read much better than most of the other kids. I started Primary 3 at Sacred Heart Primary School. That's really where most of my school memories come from.

The day my reading career started was when I was seven years old. We had a book fair in the school hall, and our teacher sent us there in pairs. I remember going there, not particularly interested in fiction. Remember I'd always like non-fiction books like astronomy and so on. But then I spotted a tattered second hand book called "The Famous Five and the Secret of the Caves." It cost only 10p, so I bought it. And guess what, I never looked back. I started devouring fiction books, tons and tons of them over the next few years.

But I didn't know I had any talent for writing until one day in Primary 5. The teacher asked us to write a poem about any topic we wanted. I sat down, chewing my pencil, and began to scribble in my jotter. The result was the poem I called "The Fog". My teacher hailed it as the best in the class, and I received a nomination as an outstanding pupil for the month. The poem was typed up on the computer, printed and posted on the library door. You won't believe this, but it stayed there for four years.

In January 1996, my Dad had a job offer from the University of Florence in Italy, and we went to live there for two years. It was a life-changing experience, again...

Check back next month when I'll continue the story!