Born on the 8th July 1969, Brighton, England, the week Thunderclap Newman pipped Elvis Presley to the number one spot in the British charts with “Something in the air”, and Neil Armstrong was still twelve days from taking the first step for “man” on the surface of the moon.

It was the end of the swinging sixties, the decade of peace, love and freedom. The height of the hippie revolution where men and women wore frayed bell-bottomed jeans, bandannas and sandals. The Kray twins were convicted of murdering Jack “the hat” McVitie and Michael Caine starred in the original version of “The Italian Job”.

I grew up to the funky sounds of the seventies from Parliament Funkadelic to the Isley Brothers, bell-bottoms remained frayed and hot pants made their breakthrough. I’d left school in the eighties when power suits and shoulder pads were in fashion, Madonna was singing “like a virgin” and Stephen Spielberg gave us ET.

At the start of the nineties I was a freelance photographer; ten years later I’d completed a University degree, cut my hair, and started wearing suits. This is at a time when, Tony Blair took “Cool Britannia” into the bubble of the noughties: the dot-com boom and bust and boom, and the financial crisis.

By 2009, I’d had a career in the new media industry for a decade and just started writing my first novel “Gentleman Jack”. Completed the first draft when the Black Eyed Peas were at number one with “The Time (Dirty Bit)” and WikiLeaks had just dumped 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables onto their website.

Today, I live with my wife and three children in the land that has given the world ABBA, Volvo, Ikea, Skype, and the creator of Dynamite, Alfred Nobel. I continue to work in New Media, and am currently writing two novels “Capricorn Candy” and “Foo Shuffle“.

Vincent Holland