I was born in Guildford, Surrey, England in 1952.My father came from a long line of landed gentlemen, each generation slightly more impoverished than the one before. Like characters out of a Jane Austen novel, we had but a few good pieces and a great name to remind us of past glories. My mother's family were Jewish, Methodist and working-class, so it is not surprising that my mother engineered an escape to New Zealand in 1957, where such distinctions were less noticeable.

Growing up in New Zealand I was an oddity, isolated on a island of old European culture and Anglo-Catholicism. My mother lived for the theatre, about which she taught me an inordinate amount. From the age of 6, I went to every play that was on in Christchurch, including my mother's early Waiting for Godot and Birthday Party, and Lysistrata at twelve.

I was fearfully shy and academic when young, winning prizes and cups, but hopeless at parties. Nowadays I never win anything and do parties rather well. Thems the breaks.

At Canterbury University, scholarship laden, I studied Latin, Greek and English, gaining a First for my M.A. in English and Latin Literature, and definitely my best effort, winning the Kippenberger Memorial Scholarship, awarded to the best student of the year over the whole university. (This isn't quite as splendid as it sounds, but where else can I brag?)

I married Jeremy Harding at an absurdly young age, started my doctoral studies, then gave birth to Cressida in 1975, perhaps not the recommended order of events. We decided to stay at Canterbury, as the line of least resistance, but did manage a glorious summer in England in 1976, during which I read black-letter Elizabethan pamphlets by day and lived it up by night.

My Ph.D. was entitled The Farrago and was a ground-breaking study of Elizabethan popular prose. Not that there's much ground to break in this field, but one day I will publish my radical re-evaluation of The Metamorphosis of Ajax, a funny book about water-closets. I will, I swear it! And the world will be amazed!

In New Zealand in 1980 there wasn't much call for expertise in Elizabethan literature, so I became a computer professional, a career that has kept me comfortable, if sometimes rather bored, ever since. Honourable exception was the five years 1983 - 1987 when I worked at the bleeding edge writing a natural language analyser, and jetting round the world talking to Fortune 500 customers. It was so good it could not possibly last. I am like a compendium of the computer profession made flesh; I reckon I have done everything, from process control systems through routers to parsing XML.

Court was born in 1986 and Antigone in 1990. People often ask us why there was an eleven year gap between Cressida and Court; the answer is: parties. Jeremy and I concentrated most of our efforts in the years 1980-1995 into entertaining, and a great time was had by all. Our parties became a watchword, and our Thursday nights are still deeply missed. (by us anyway). I do not like to reflect on how many relationships were made or broken at parties of ours.

During all this socialising, I was also writing regularly for the New Zealand Listener and the Christchurch Press - music and theatre reviews in the main, but I also had a short-lived but much enjoyed rock column. I was asked to become Chief Theatre critic for the Christchurch Press, and this role I combined with those of Churchwarden of St Michael's Christchurch, Deputy Chair of the board of a Theological Institute, and Regional Information Systems Manager for MAF. I was quite busy.

Busy, but wanting something else. We resigned from all our posts and packed up the house, landing in England in an unnaturally grey April in 1996. I started counting the months till we could go home, until my literary luck turned.

I had been writing novels of various kinds for about ten years, garnering much encouragement but no success. But one day in England I sat down and wrote Palliser Wentwood at white heat, polished it up and sent it off. Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape, a much revered publisher, loved it, and its successors, and published them.

So we decided to remain in England for the time being. Cressida and her husband Jon Cherrie (with a doctorate apiece) joined us in 2001, and settled in Cambridge, where they have frighteningly hi-tech jobs. Currently (2004) Jeremy and I live with Court and Antigone in St Albans, which is twenty minutes by train from London (plus twenty minutes stuffing-around time at either end). I can indulge my passion for the theatre and the visual arts endlessly, and sometimes I do.

We consider ourselves lucky in that the choir at our church (St Saviour's, St Albans) has been transformed into a very good one, and as church music has always been a particular shared pleasure of ours, we are like dogs in the proverbial (though it's always a bit alarming to be the weakest link in something rather good). I have also gotten implicated in a very good theatre group (www.ovo.org.uk) and at the advanced age of 51 directed my first play. Ah bliss!

I drive 60 miles a day to work on the most congested motorway in Europe and still I write, sing, preach; I go and look at paintings and sculpture, I go to wonderful (and sometimes less so) theatre, make and nurture friendships, buzz to Europe three or four times a year. As lives go, it is not so bad. And it's only half spent.