22nd September 2014
I first produced this piece when I opened my website in January this year. It has been very popular with my visitors over the intervening nine months, so much so that I thought I might launch it once again for those new to my site - with one or two slight embellishments. Here goes:

Let me introduce myself by giving out some of the things that make me tick – and in doing so, let you know whether I’m the kind of person you might like to identify with and whose stuff might interest you.
So, here is a list of what I’m interested in and get up to – I hope some of them might strike a bell with lots of you out there.

I like people, especially out of the ordinary ones. What makes them tick?

I enjoy life, family and friends – the external world; sort of concentric circles outwards from who I am and where I live.

Work: this consists of writing and research mainly, but I have had several careers: electrical engineer; RAF service; holiday camp entertainer; licensed hotel owner; private guest house proprietor, among others.
Good health: well, this is a no-brainer – you just got to keep in shape, you owe it to yourself and those who love you and depend on you. I work out, walk and swim.

Humour: having a good laugh with agreeable company or reading a book, seeing a film or stage act that creases you up.

Money: who isn’t interested in that? We never have enough and there’s always someone or some organisation ready to take it away.

Good food: Yeah, I like my share of the ‘fine dining’ if I’m flush. All sorts of cuisines are up for grabs. I’m no picker – just don’t give me boiled onions or raisins! I like a drink - within moderation.

Drugs don't and never have interested me.

Travel and Holidays: Can’t get enough; but I don’t like the one without the other. Unfortunately, airports are not friendly places now and the roads are so crowded; rail stations, however, have been getting their act together and the train is making a comeback. I visit the Med a lot; been many times to the States; even went to Australia for three months.

Good weather: letting me get outside and around different places – well that kind of speaks for itself. Where I live, however, the skies are not always blue – in fact I think the whole world shudders at the mention or thought of what we have to put up with, at times; but we kid you all a lot about that.

Various pursuits, hobbies and such, interest me: Intellectual quests, Art, Literature, Genealogy; music (just about every kind that has a melody, allows me to hear the words, or almost makes me swoon away with the sheer splendour of what I’m hearing. I’m thinking of the standard crooners of the last twenty years: Sinatra, Como, Nat Cole - even Dean Martin; of jazz, Country and Western, through to Puccini, Rimsky Korsakov, and tenors like Pavarotti).

Sport: soccer and golf have (I suppose) been my main interests and where I have shown some talent (well in the first one anyway - I'm still a high handicapper at golf) though swimming and throwing the discus were, still are, other likes.

I am always wondering where the world is going? What will it be like in 200 years? So, science, cosmology, new materials, inventions, discoveries all excite me – and I read and inquire about all this.
I like our world – it’s maybe not much – in the cosmological scale of things, as the man said
 – but its home!
I’m sure none of this is much different from you. It’s in the things that make us most happy, and our ability to avoid what gives us most pain that the differences occur.

I have all the same urges and drives that are common to others: I like to talk; I admire and (covertly) still fancy the opposite sex – don’t tell the wife. I like to be approved of. I like dogs – but don’t have one – like cats and horses too.

Where I might be a little different from some, lies in the fact that as well as writing about people who could be my contemporaries, who have lived and are living in my era, I also write history books; I delve into the past.

This is why I promote my slogan: 'GKM's Unique World View.'

I am best known for my efforts at understanding the present world, and as an historian, the one that has passed away. Where the future will take us is a land to be explored.

A good education and a whole range of life experiences, research and study are the tools used for this approach and intellectual grasp: MA (Honours); M.Litt; PhD.

Of course, what goes in also seeks a way of getting out — after cogitation. Teaching and lecturing have formed channels for this outpouring; as have books (fiction and non-fiction) articles I have written expressing thoughts and opinions I have formed.

I have read, taught, lectured and written about people whose lives are as interesting as those alive. (I wonder if Science Fiction isn’t also just about envisaging the interesting individuals that might be met in the future, just like those you meet in history, the world that has passed away.)

Anyway, what this amounts to is that I have a fair bit of ‘history’ under my belt, so to speak, and an awful lot of it still to write – it lies about my computer in great big slush files, which have still to be raided and formed into lives, subjects, theories – into any sort of project you can think of.

(You can run your eye over all the stuff already written, and I will keep you up to date with what I’m working on at any one moment; maybe even ask your help, on occasion).

I like stories very much, both short stories and novels; I like anecdotes and funny sketches, whether they are made up or real.

I like poetry

I like films

There’s not much I don’t like in the cinematic, written and spoken worlds.

You can let your eyes slide over my fiction stuff – published and available on all the main internet sites – with the links (just as with my history books and articles) provided here on this website.

Finally, I do hope you will wish to continue with this conversation - at times it seems awfully one-sided to me. Nevertheless, at times I can convince myself that it might be of some value to others.
All the best.