2. My father wanted to escape all those European entanglements and so my family joined that post-war migration to North America in 1957, spending the first year in Toronto.

3.We next enjoyed three adventurous years in Newfoundland. The island traces its British roots back to the days of Queen Elizabeth and I early found myself engrossed in reading that history. It was here as a nine-year-old that my fascination with the Elizabethan age began.

4. In these years I experienced my family's born-again religiosity. As a result, the King James Bible early became familiar ground. When I first studied Shakespeare in high school, I found the language relatively easy to read out loud while my classmates could only stumble. This is not to suggest I understood what I recited any better than they, only that I had an immediate ‘actor's feel’ for how the language should sound.

5. In high school in Ottawa I enjoyed music above all else. My initial desire to emulate the Beatles eventually led me to explore many forms of music.

6. After high school I worked a year before taking a degree in English language and literature at Carleton University in Ottawa. Shakespeare was among my favourites. At university I also became aware of the revival of early music then taking place and was part of several recorder quartets. Again the Elizabethans (especially Morley, Dowland and Gibbons) stood out for me.

7. I spent a couple of years as an English teacher in Québec, living in St. Jean d'Iberville and later in Montréal. In the summer of 1975 I made a journey through Virginia which again helped bridge that Elizabethan past with the modern world I was living in. In 1976-7 I made a tour through Europe before settling down on the West Coast of Canada in 1977.

I began working for the Vancouver Public Library in 1978, first as a stacks runner, then as the mail clerk, a branch clerk, then head clerk, before I decided to become a librarian. I married in 1980 and over the next six years became the father to two lovely children. I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Master's degree in librarianship in 1986. I continued working for VPL, spending many years in children's services before becoming a branch head.

8. It was in this time that I formed a trio with fellow librarian, Trish Miller, and musical clown, Ralph Shaw, that we called Birds of a Feather.

We have released two albums to date, Time to Fly and Birds of a Feather: Unplucked! It is music the whole family can enjoy though aimed at the growing needs of elementary school children. Please have a listen.
This Old Man MP3            Lavender’s Blue MP3

9. I was drawn into the question of who wrote the works of Shakespeare in 1997. Over the previous year in conversation with friends I had twice found myself wondering out loud if these works had really been written by the actor from Stratford. The second time I was quite embarrassed because I had promised to look it up after the first time! I found many sites on the web devoted to the authorship question. Though they introduced me to the many aspects of the question, not one (neither orthodox nor unorthodox) persuaded me that the question had really been settled. As a librarian with a bird's-eye-view of the library, I wondered if I could do better. So began my search for the record of the time and what it might tell us about the question of who authored Shakespeare's works. This task has now engaged me for nine years. I should like to make this the labour of my retirement years.