I’m a guitarist, cyclist, and writer living in rural France — specifically the Haute-Vienne, in the Limousin. I’ve been playing guitar for over fifty years and racing bikes for most of my adult life. These two things have defined me more than anything else, and they’ve mostly been kept separate: most people who know me as a cyclist have no idea I play guitar, and most people who know me as a musician have no idea I shave my legs and wear lycra.

That deliberate double life has been going on for decades. It still makes me smile.

The guitar

I started playing guitar while recovering from a motorcycle crash — organised some lessons, got hooked, and never looked back. I joke that from that point on my life has been punctuated by guitars and bike crashes. Both statements are true.

My musical home these days is jazz, and I’m an active member of Matt Warnock’s online jazz guitar community, working through repertoire, arranging, and developing as a player alongside musicians from around the world. My influences include Bill Frisell, Jim Hall, Robin Trower, and John Abercrombie.

My main guitars are a 1967 Gretsch 6122 Country Gentleman — Brooklyn-built, pre-Baldwin, original Filter’Tron pickups — and a 2004 CIJ Fender Stratocaster in pink paisley, with handwound pickups from a luthier in Angoulême. I play jazz on the Strat. This surprises people. It probably shouldn’t.

The cycling

I came to competitive cycling relatively late — in my mid-thirties — after moving to Liverpool to study for a degree. I’d been running, but the streets of Liverpool with loose dogs and marauding gangs eventually persuaded me to look for an alternative. I joined the Liverpool Century Cycling Club, and got thoroughly schooled. The racing scene there was fierce and the Scousers were tough taskmasters. Some of what I learned with them still shapes how I approach things today.

I was tested at college and told I didn’t have the physiology to amount to much as a sportsman. That assessment turned out to be useful fuel.

I became National Veteran Mountain Bike Champion in 1992, won the National Veteran MTB Points Series the same year, and represented Britain at the World Mountain Bike Championships three years running. Over the following decade I accumulated national medals in mountain biking, cyclocross, and road racing, and was ranked UK No. 1 in the BCF Veterans Cross Country category in 1999.

I moved to France some years ago and have continued racing here, winning regional and departmental championships into my sixties. I identify primarily as a cyclist. When people ask what I do, that’s what I say.

Any fool can ride a bike…

The blog

I’ve been writing here since 2003. The blog itself was born from a crash — a serious fracture dislocation during a race warm-up that kept me at home for weeks on end. I started writing to fill the stillness. Twenty-odd years later I’m still at it.

The blog covers jazz guitar, cycling, life in rural France, and the creative process — often all at once. I’m interested in what happens when you’ve been doing something for a very long time and are still learning. Both cycling and music have taught me that the horizon keeps moving. That’s not a frustration. It’s the whole point.

I also have a YouTube channel where I post guitar performances, arrangements, and musical projects.

If any of this resonates, I’d be glad to hear from you.

There’s a Roosevelt quote that has stayed with me for years. It’s not hard to see why…

It’s not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or when the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worth cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat. Theodore Roosevelt