In an effort to make myself more interesting, here are some things which you may not know about me. 

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Despite having a degree in maths, easily having the patience and skills to solve the Guardian crossword most days and demonstrably having the intellectual capability to understand the logic involved, I am surprisingly poor at Sudoku puzzles.  I regularly do things which are more intellectually complex, and could describe in some detail most of the logical techniques you can apply to fill the grid in, but the coherent ability to solve the puzzles is a persistent intellectual blind spot for me.

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I have a little recording studio at home and although I don't write music all that often, I regularly de-stress by going into the studio and singing and playing piano for a while at the end of the working day.  I have trained for years as a singer and have been playing piano since I was pretty young.  I can also just about get a chord out of a guitar and a rhythm from a drum kit, too.

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I read more books every year than I have seen films in my lifetime.  Growing up, I was given books by my Mum from pretty much as soon as I was old enough to hold one and so books became my most comfortable way to consume fiction.  I regularly read over 100 books a year and always have a book on the go.  I never have two books on the go at once and have a rule that if I'm not fully absorbed in a book by fifty pages in, I  put it down and start another one.  My Waterstones loyalty card is one of only two loyalty cards I have in my wallet.

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I'm an avowed Francophile.  I am fluent in French to a pretty good standard (around C1 for those who know that that means).  I still take regular classes to work on my style, richness of vocabulary and natural-sounding fluency.  Guy de Maupassant is one of my favourite authors, and I've never read any of his work in English.  Seriously, though, his short stories are worth the read whatever language you read them in.

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And finally, despite how much I've travelled for business over the years, I'm not really a great fan of travelling away from home.  I am happy to do it when needed and it's always great to meet colleagues and friends face-to-face but there's always a part of me that would rather me at home in my own bed surrounded by my own books and not busying my way through airports and hotel lobbies.

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