ABOUT ME

If you want to know more about me, then the easiest way is for me to tell you how and why I ended up doing this.

 

How did I get here?

 

My mum died.

 

As a family, we were lucky; she had a great send off.  Afterwards my best friend said ‘I know this sounds weird, but I really enjoyed it’.  So that’s when I decided all funerals should end like that.

 

I got chatting to a few people who’d been involved in helping us with Mum’s service and found that over the course of my long and diverse career, I’d pretty much amassed the necessary skills to make a go of it.

 

I began working life as an office clerk, which taught me good organisational skills and also the need for accuracy; a spell in sales honed my conversational skills and pushed me to think about the ‘needs and wants’ of the person in front of me.  

 

A ‘sharp left turn’ took me into an extended period in the media which is where I began writing for living, I also learned how to take what someone had told me and turn it into beautiful prose, albeit, in my case, in a rather down-to-earth tone.

 

Then I struck out on my own, did hours and hours of public speaking, presentations and training;  I stood in front of hundreds of people along the way but somehow also found the time to write about a dozen books, many of them published internationally.

 

When I wasn’t working, I took to performing, only on the amateur stage mind;  for all that, it taught me everything I needed to know about standing in front of an audience.  I sang, I danced, performed my own poetry and stand-up comedy too.  I don’t do a lot of that at funerals, but you’d be surprised at how handy it’s been.