‘Write about what you know’ is an excellent piece of advice, especially for a first-time novelist. And I seem to have taken it to heart.

But Now You’re Here – not for my personal and emotional life but certainly for my professional life – is more or less autobiographical.

Born just after the war, I left grammar school in the home counties at 16. I came to London for an initially peripatetic working life, including time in a laundry, as an insurance clerk and in Golders Green bowling alley. I got into the recording business, wanting to be a producer. (I really was there when Dusty Springfield recorded ‘Some of Your Lovin’’.)

At 21 I fell into advertising with an impossibly lucky break as a trainee copywriter, starting at one of the (then) very best agencies in the world, CDP. Over the next forty years I worked in 14 different agencies, including a stint as World Wide and Executive Creative Director at an agency located in the Chrysler Building in New York.

A series of mergers and burgeoning ennui saw me leave the business in the early 2000s to go sailing, watch cricket, be ill, do a bit of journalism, write a non-fiction book, The Real Mad Men, and most recently, the novel But Now You’re Here. Another novel, Latitude, springing from a two-month passage on a container ship in 2005, will follow some time in 2027.

There are three glorious daughters and five raucous grandchildren. After living in London for more than 60 years I’m now partly in Oxford and partly by the sea near Herne Bay with my partner, Jude Kelly.