As a child I loved to shock others with the tale that I had been abandoned at birth by gypsies and raised en famille with kindly mice in the crypt of an old church.

Alas! The truth is altogether more unremarkable!

For I was born and raised in the ancient City of York – a Yorky who lives by the ethos that a book, a decent cup of tea and a bar of chocolate can ALWAYS make the world a better place. 

A dreamer from birth with a taste for history and the irresistible urge to create – by day you can usually find me along with my battered tool box inside my atelier creating away with the radio blaring out and surrounded by shelves of weird creatures, baskets of fabric, tubs of paints, the odd pot of glue, stacks of paper and piles of exotic woods .

AND usually under the watchful eye of a black feline with an abundance of cattiude.

Or another feline who favours a small church bell tower for creating mischief!

However, and as the sun falls on another day and with the messy apron discarded – I go in search of the dead.

For if I’m NOT musing upon the discovery of a mysterious bundle of long-forgotten ephemera, poring over the details of a tatty burial record or recording an exciting discovery of an elusive ancestor in an old notebook – I will be leading the unsuspecting through the snickelways and secret passageways of York for Death in a Chocolate Box while sharing the tales of those ordinary folk who have ALL been lost to history – until now!

I have been asked on more than one occasion how I can move between two very different worlds – one which indulges my passion for creating all things miniature and the other in which I can be found wandering through cemeteries in a quest to wake the dead.

For me, it’s not a question of ‘why’ but rather ‘why not?’