Michael is a creative person. He's written much poetry and prose. Lots of his poems have been accepted for publication. He's programmed computers over many years as a hobbyist and professional, and he's an accomplished sight-reader/ amateur musician at the piano.

Michael studied STEM subjects at school, going on to get an honours degree in chemistry from the University of York in 1989. That year he began piano, passing grade 8 with merit in just over seven years. Whilst working on classical music, he also earned a master's degree in computing.

He met Clare in 1993, and married in 2006. She passed six years later, after their 18 years together. Clare was 15 years his senior and suffered greatly from rheumatoid arthritis.​

His third major computing job lasted from 1997 to 2010, ending in redundancy. He also started writing in 1997, in the form of his roman à clef. That can be found in part 2 of his "Everything" book. He enrolled on the Writer's bureau poetry course in 2000, and hundreds of poems resulted, albeit after a ten year slow start.​

He writes very little poetry now, and prefers transparent prose. Much of his work is around psychology, especially identity and its folly, mental health, and religious aspects: elements of humanities in other words. He's also blogged and written about life more openly.​​

Michael has bipolar (1) disorder, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and paroxysmal atrial fibrillation: as such, a multi-morbid serious mental illness (SMI). He was briefly hospitalised after surviving a consequent heart attack in 2023, aged 55. Multimorbid SMIs reduce life expectancy by 15 to 20 years (so the MI figured).

​​​Whilst the poetry course taught Michael to write, he still considers himself functionally illiterate and reads to a poor standard for an adult. He therefore gets to reinvent the wheel, and strengthens existing wisdoms; ultimately, he hopes, our common-sense, too.​​

Last be not least, he remarried in 2015, to Michelle (pictured below). ​​​​​

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There's lots more to Michael's story. It's in his verse: "Everything".