I am originally from Newcastle, and have had many hobbies besides chess. Art...Oil Painting, I like the work of Lucian Freud and David Hockney....reading...food and a nice bottle of wine or beer!
I started playing chess when at school. In later years I was unable to play club chess because of shift work, so I bought a chess computer a champion challenger 7 in 1977 this led to more sophisticated machines in my Quest to become a better player...Mephisto II...Morphy encore...Constellation...Super Constellation, this was the first chess computer to start causing me problems. I stopped playing chess in 1993, until I joined Chess .Com in 2007. Still a bit rusty, but Rust Never Sleeps.