I travelled around England a little when I was very young which opened my eyes to different perspectives. Even a small country like England has amazing diversity county to county. In my middle to late teenage years I left home to live in London. It was the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and places like Notting Hill, Kensington and Chelsea were really alive. As a young reporter on the ‘Kensington and Chelsea Post’ I was bang in the middle of all the excitement. There was plenty to inspire.

I wrote my first stories when I was about eleven having already decided I wanted to be either a writer or a long-distance lorry driver. One tale was about a couple of ghostly medieval knights fighting on a castle battlements and the other a first-person war story in which the hero dies. “How can you tell the story if you’re dead?” asked my teacher, not unreasonably. I learned to watch my writing closely.

Watching plots, characters and ideas you didn’t know even existed leap alive onto the page, born as if from nowhere. I’m sure everyone says this. Also when you later learn you’ve touched someone with your words.

I have a troublesome child called ‘The Broken Knight.’ It’s very wayward, breaks all the rules and nobody cares to take it on board. It begins as a scrupulously accurate historical novella of 46,000 words which, with the help of a little magical realism, morphs into pure ‘what-if?’ science fiction. The latter chapters require a complete rewrite of world history which was enormous fun to do. Australia for instance is little colonised, the major part being the massive free state of Aboriginia. Wallaceburn is the capital of Scotland and Napoleon is an Italian hero not a Frenchman.

Without a flicker of embarrassment: Hemingway, John le Carre, AS Byatt, Donna Tartt, Sebastian Faulks, Stephen Baxter (Science Fiction) , David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) and Mark Helprin (A Winter’s Tale). I have read some fine Australian short story writers too.

Being retired I have plenty of free time to spend and like to travel widely and walk as far as an intermittently gammy knee will allow. I also write songs and play a simple guitar and sing in local bars, clubs and restaurants, sometimes (very proudly) with my daughter Emily.

The first serious attempt at writing was ‘The Lonely House on the Moors’, a traditional ghost story. It was closely followed by two abortive attempts at novels: ‘The Children of the Galexplosion’ and ‘Talking Fifth Floor Blues’. Both were abandoned, unloved and unfinished. The latter was autobiographical and written because I thought it high time I told the story of my life. I was 18.

This is varied. Sometimes ideas come to me in that half-conscious state in the middle of the night. I get up immediately while it is still fresh and take a beer and a cup of tea to my study and work until dawn. Other times, I just sit at my computer and watch what comes out. Some of my favourite stories have worked that way.

Like most people, I enjoy getting absolutely lost in a big fat novel. My all-time favourites have been Leonard Cohen’s The Favourite Game and Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale. I also love collections of short stories that I will read hungrily from start to finish, no cherry picking.