Hmm. I don’t really like writing these things. My Twitter profile says “Husband and dad. Language geek, pianist, amateur photographer and educator. Director of Radio Lingua, Coffee Break language-learning. /Canon/Moleskine.” That pretty much sums it up!

I’ve been working on online things since around 1998 when I was teaching in Mearns Castle High School in East Renfrewshire. I set up a site called LinguaWeb for my students to get a bit of help with their homework and some extra practice of their language skills. I took on the post of Coordinator of the Partners in Excellence project in East Ayrshire, North Ayrshire and Argyll & Bute, promoting language learning through technology and we built the social network LanguageZone where the students involved in the project were able to read blogs from young native speakers, practise their French, German and Spanish with games and discussions.

In 2006 I set up Radio Lingua as the home of our nascent podcast Coffee Break Spanish. Since then we’ve built a network of podcasts and in 2014 we delivered 16.4 million free language lessons to learners around the world. We also have a schools branch of the company which delivers content and services to schools around the UK and further afield.

So much for the “day job” side of things. In my spare time I enjoy making music, and I’ve played the piano since the age of five. Back in 2010 I set myself a challenge to record a piece of music every day and I was delighted to achieve this. I repeated this challenge in 2015 with a new set of piano performances, and the 2015 songs can be accessed here. Unfortunately the original collection of songs from 2010 is no longer available online, so as 2017 begins I’ve decided to repost them here on the site. You can find the retrospective 2017 reposts here. I’ve recreated my personal site as a place to store my music, so hopefully you’ll enjoy my tunes!