Seven Things My Readers Should Know About Me - By JAMES BOWRING

1. James Bowring is not my real name. It is a pseudonym that I’ve adopted to separate my writing efforts from the rest of my life. My real name is relatively unusual and is often misspelt and mispronounced, but its rarity makes it quite easy for me to be tracked down, which I would hate. Having a pseudonym also makes it easier to pretend that it’s nothing to do with me when a ‘bad review’ comes in. James Bowring, incidentally, was a distant relative. He worked as a gamekeeper and I’ve often wondered what tales he could tell!

2. I spent a good deal of my working life in local government and, from time to time, was required to write a report for a committee of councillors. On reading one of my reports a councillor once told me that it was one of the finest pieces of fiction he'd ever read. And that started me thinking…

3. My long-suffering wife of nearly fifty years often accuses me of having a devious mind and an unhealthily fertile imagination. She is right. My over-active brain is often trying to concoct a plot out of a chance observation or an overheard comment. This means that I am often worrying about a potential plot device, like why there is confetti in the vacuum cleaner, instead of paying proper attention to things that are being said around me. Sorry, what was that?

4. Throughout most of our fifty years together, we have shared our house with one, sometimes two cats. The present incumbents, two brothers, are really highly-trained saboteurs who know how to cause maximum disruption with minimum effort. They also like to supervise me very closely when I am working on the computer. One of them managed to destroy a large section of one of my drafts novels by hitting the “delete” button. Now I save my work much more regularly.

5. I love puzzles. I try to do a cryptic crossword every day and love logic problems, mazes and, of course, solving whodunits with varying degrees of success. I enjoy mysteries of all kinds, like ‘why do our cats prefer to sleep on the computer keyboard rather than the many comfortable chairs that are available to them?’ ‘Why is the item that I placed so carefully on the desk in front of me five minutes ago nowhere to be found?’ ‘Where is my car key?’ ‘Where is my car?’

6. I am regularly accused of having no dress sense as I tend to wear a randomly selected combination of colourful shirts and jumpers – nothing white and no beige! The main advantage of this foible is that my wife can easily find me when I am wandering around a car park looking for my car.

7. I have a tendency to be clumsy. I regularly trip on paving stones and tree roots, I am equally competent at falling up steps and down steps and I once put my foot through a chair when trying to climb on it. But my “piece de resistance” is undoubtedly my talent for knocking over a full glass of water or other liquid at the dinner table, which has entertained my dining companions many times over the years. And now I’m off to pour myself a mug of tea.