Biography of Trevor Mendham

I went to Princes Plain Primary School at Bromley Common. My rebellious nature showed early - at the age of nine I organised an (unsuccessful) pupil walkout to protest at the school's refusal to use the apostrophe in its name.

From PPP I went to St Dunstan's College, Catford. Despite the enlightened apostrophical attitude it was then a dreadful place. "Hail thee festival day..." still gives me nightmares. Time there was made bearable only by the presence of a) a computer (rare at the time - it literally took up the whole room) and b) Dave Holland, my sixth form maths teacher who spent many hours with us just shooting the intellectual breeze. Good practice for stoned evenings to come.

From there I went on to Warwick University. Great days, even if the University did seem to consider itself "Warwick Conference Centre"; students were grudgingly tolerated only because we were necessary for it to call itself a University.

In between playing pinball and general hedonistic pursuits I was for two years social secretary of the SF & Fantasy Society which went by the snappy acronym of "UWSF&FS" (or "Eustace"). My crowning achievement was getting Stephen Moore (Marvin) to come and chat with the society. This was rather undermined by not having enough money to pay for him to get a taxi back to his hotel. He ended up riding pillion on the bike of one of our members whose sobriety was definitely in question...

At the end of all this the University gave me a BSc in Maths. I know, I know - Pure Maths is an art. But we had a choice and I was being pragmatic.

From there I went straight to being a wage slave in the software industry. Over almost twenty years I worked in companies of less than a dozen people through to big multi-nationals. I've done everything: telephone support, coding, setting up networks, pre-sales presentations, team leading, calming down customers threatening to sue the company... My favourite support call came from a customer who was having trouble with a script and said: "I tested it with no data and it worked perfectly".

My highest profile job was the National Garden Festival in Gateshead in 1990 where, working for a small systems house, I almost single-handedly wrote, installed and supported the ticketing software. I'm still amazed it worked!

At the time computing was mostly fun. Nowadays, with the dominance of Microsoft, software is not an industry I want to be associated with. So in 2001 I took the plunge, threw in my ridiculously well-paid Software Architect job and decided to try to make a living as a writer.

So far this has been spectacularly unsuccessful. If any national newspaper needs a reliable, articulate and opinionated columnist, you know where to come!

After spending far too many years living in the South London suburbs I finally moved to weird and wonderful Edinburgh at the end of 2003.

I'm not married and have no children - two things I don't intend to change.

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