The story begins

 

I left school with one ambition, to become a sports journalist.

 

For the next five years, that was the plan: learn the trade, serve my apprenticeship, understand how to find the story and, more importantly, how to tell it.

 

Life had other plans.

 

Marriage came young, followed by responsibilities, bills to pay and the rather unavoidable business of earning a living.

 

Journalism had to make way for the real world.

 

So the notebook was put down and I went to work.

 

What followed was a career that took me through manufacturing, sales, electrical and mechanical engineering, contracting and building services, from the factory floor and plant room to major construction projects.

 

But something from those early days never left me.

 

I was still a writer.

 

By the late 1980s, I was writing my first Operation & Maintenance Manuals.

 

Suddenly, two very different parts of my life had come together: an understanding of engineering and the ability to explain it in words.

 

That became the foundation of The Manualwriter.

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More than five decades later, I am still doing what I set out to do when I left school.

 

Finding the story. Understanding it and writing it so somebody else can understand it too.

 

The subject simply changed.

 

Engineering gave me the subject.

 

Experience gave me the understanding.

 

Writing gave me the voice.