Alan Charlton

I was born in the mid-1960s in the City and County of Bristol; my first few days were spent in the baby unit at Keynsham, which name will be familiar to fans of Radio Luxembourg, to which I used to listen on a little transistor radio under the duvet at night.

I grew up through a carefree and happy childhood on the outskirts of Bristol, during which time I broke things, set fire to stuff, did dangerous experiments with combustible compounds in my mate's shed, brewed beer and generally had a right old time.

I'm now approaching my mid-40s and enjoy life as much as I did then... the principal difference being that these days I have the money to pay for it :-)

I ride motorcycles when I'm not crashing them, and I'm currently the proud owner of a slightly scruffy but superbly-fettled (courtesy of PDQ Motorcycle Developments) Honda VTR1000SP-2. I also run a 2010 BMW R100GS, which is a strange and wonderful machine.  It naturally barely needs mentioning that I ride with extreme caution and observe all speed limits...

Being something of a geek by nature, I naturally migrated towards an electronic conferencing service named Cix in about 1989, where - having an interest in the social and technical aspects of motorcycling - I joined a conference named "bikers" and became a member of Team Waste.

I play the guitar very badly. I played a lot about 18-20 years ago and wasn't at all bad, but somewhere along the line I must have lost the ability, because whatever I do now it always sounds plunk (© N. Molesworth). If you haven't a clue what a Molesworth is, here are some books on the subject.

I like food. There's nothing I like better than a damned good meal with friends, whether it's somewhere like The River Cafe or The Castle Hotel, or being catered for in true Team Waste style by a lovely hostess with magnificent hair and a scary hat.

I hardly need mention that I like booze too. Decent English beer such as Wadworth's 6X (the brewery for which is about 5 miles from my home), Decent draught Bass is a rare treat, and Marston's Pedigree or anything from the Smiles brewery in Bristol rate high among my favourites.  I have also recently started all-grain beer brewing at home, which is my friend Pete's fault and is a hugely interesting and rewarding hobby - thanks to the strange and obsessive people at Jim's Beer Kit, I now own an expanding collection of stainless steel vessels, boilers, mash tuns, pumps and what seems likes several miles of tubing.

Wines I enjoy tend to be full-bodied French reds from Burgundy, the Rhone valley and the Bordeaux region. I do enjoy white wines too, although I tend to go for Sauvignon Blanc, occasionally Semillon, but infinitely preferably a nice, dry, cold Chablis. I generally dislike most other forms of Chardonnay, particularly those over-oaked types that seem so popular in the Antipodes.

Professionally, I am an IT contractor in the defence industry, with specialisms in design and implementation of network management, system monitoring and event management systems.  I also wrangle databases and not enough Unix.

So, that's me. Kind of. If this site is kept up-to-date, my musings may well appear here