I was born in Edinburgh.At the age of nine, plagued by nightmares, I began a series of nighttime escapades. Once at three in the morning I sat alone on a log. It had been an anarchic summer and I was lost. I asked the universe for directions. A star fell from the sky. I ran home into the arms of a large police officer, summoned by my distraught mother. I sensed then, that solitude, silence and darkness were preferable to the comfort of home and authority.My school, the largest in Europe, was eight storeys high. Over a thousand pupils infected the concrete like a plague of ants. For entertainment they might stand outside on precarious ledges, steal all the desks from a classroom, drop bricks through the roofs of cars or hang friends from the stairwells. Teachers responded by electrifying water, indiscriminate lashing with leather belts and inspirational mental torture. The geography department rung to the sound of the reveille, the chemistry floor to the sound of dropping desks and the English classroom to the glug of surreptitious whisky consumption.Reluctant to leave this colourful institution, my career path was unsettled: I tried labourer, clerk, gardener, salesman, barman, doorman, singer, songwriter. I played Querelle of Brest in an avant-garde Mime Company for three years in a controversial adaptation of Genet's novel banned by the Scottish Kirk. These occupations all betrayed a similar pattern: Initial enthusiasm, bemusement, claustrophobic terror.I hitched from the southern tip of Spain to the northern flats of Holland, with a fiver sewn in my jacket; worked the Paris Metro as a busker and bottled Cafes in the south of France, Belgium and Holland. I picked grapes near Perpignon, swam naked in mountain pools.I settled down in Manchester where I became a street trader. Sold coats, watches. Sometimes the watches worked. Later I stewarded on the oil rigs in the North Sea. Fourteen hours a day for fourteen days, night shift, with three breaks of twenty minutes.I refound music. I taught myself fiddle, banjo, mandolin, penny whistle and piano in descending order of ability. After some good times in various folk duos, I lost it again. I became a Philosophy and Sociology teacher in a Manchester grammar school where I rediscovered my innate horror of authority.After my first marriage failed, I ditched it all. I played banjo in Irish bars in Savannah, Georgia, Jazz bars and Riverboats in New Orleans. Then left for Germany where after a period of solo work in German kneipen I arranged the songs for, and toured with, the Dance Spectacular 'Celtic Life'.Latterly, I joined the traditional band Scapa Flow and was lucky enough to get a Folk CD into the BBC Indie Charts in 2004. This provided much amusement for my teenage kids but ultimately, failed to secure the mansion that Les Grande Meaulnes promised me in my teens.