About

I was born in Dewsbury and grew up a few miles away in Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire. I left school at sixteen, certain that formal education and I were never going to get along.

My parents divorced when I was eleven. I spent my last year of school rebelling against the whole idea of it, and my GCSE results made that very clear. It didn't worry me much. I had been working since I was fourteen, and I already knew I learned better by doing.

I started out volunteering at a zoo, mostly with the reptiles and the small animals, and ran guided tours for children's birthday parties. Then I began volunteering with disabled children, and that was the work that mattered. I was recognised with a Diana Award for it, which meant a great deal to a teenager who had just decided formal education was not for him.

At sixteen I took my first proper job as a nursery nurse, at the same nursery I had gone to as a child, working mostly with the older kids in the out-of-school club. Two years in, I wanted to see something beyond Yorkshire, so I spent a summer at a camp outside Tucson, Arizona, working with children from every kind of background alongside people from all over the world. It was the best thing I had done up to that point.

Childcare was good work and I was good at it. But there was a roof on it, and I have never been much good with roofs. I wanted broader impact and more room to grow.

So I started trying things. I drove around Yorkshire as a relief security guard, covering Job Centres for guards who were off sick. I marshalled paintball at weekends. I moved to alarm response on nights, which was good fun and genuinely lonely, with long gaps between callouts that I filled with video games. I spent a few months as a sewer technician across East Yorkshire, hard and filthy work, helping people who were having a properly rough day of it. Then back to security, this time as an overnight supervisor running the control room. Somewhere in among it all I pulled coffee as a barista in a high-end salon. None of it was the answer. Each one taught me something.

Eventually I joined Auto Silicone Hoses, packing boxes in the warehouse at weekends. That became full-time, then picking, then a place on the customer service team handling sales, complaints and the people who walked through the door. I tried marketing too, writing the eBay and Amazon listings and setting prices, and learned quickly that marketing was not my strength. Customer service was. Talking to people, solving their problem, sending them off happier than they arrived. That thread ran through everything, from the zoo to the Job Centres to the warehouse counter. Twelve years ago it took me into Arla.

I live in Gdańsk, on the Polish coast. The move here came with a manager role at Arla, and it was an easy decision to make. My partner had made the same trip in reverse a couple of years earlier, from Gdańsk to Leeds, so coming back was familiar ground for both of us. I relocated, and I have not looked back. I would happily move again for the right role, though probably not back to the UK.

Away from work I am usually making something or taking something apart. Computer games, photography, model rocketry, and a homelab that hosts this very site and gives me something to tinker with most evenings. And every day, a long walk with the dog.