‘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 – if not for my personal and emotional life, then 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 recorded ‘Some of Your Lovin’’.)

I fell into advertising as a copywriter at 21 with an impossibly lucky break, 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 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, and 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 in late 2026.

I have 3 glorious daughters and 5 raucous grandchildren. After living in London for more than 60 years I now live in Oxford and by the sea near Herne Bay with Jude, my partner.