Right, here goes...

I was born at a young age in Surrey, spent a miserable few years in Basingstoke, and now am back in my beautiful Surrey again. I started playing the clarinet as a small child, ended up reading music at a not-very-ancient-at-all university (it became a university whilst I was there. Note, this is a coincidence.), and now earn some pence in exchange for having sold my soul to a filthy corporate multinational. I do some clarinet tuition as well, and in an ideal world would leave aforementioned filthy corporate multinational and just do music. As I still have a mortgage to pay, a hamster to feed and opera tickets to purchase, I won't be getting my soul back just yet 

I met Lord_DHS at the Proms, and we married a few years later. This gave me a real-life fishy surname, hence my screen name here and elsewhere.

Most of my pocket money is spent on opera tickets, although those who know me will testify that I adore JSB and Finzi too.

Oh, and how can I leave without mention of a certain baritone:



Um, I think that's the basics covered, but post away if you have further questions.

I always knew this was an immoral forum.

Just a few lines about one of your newest members. I have no musical training, and had little interest in classical music until I was approaching middle age, and ever since have been trying to make up for lost time. I suppose you could say I'm on the periphery of the musical world, having served on the board of our local philharmonic orchestra, a local start-up opera company (it failed), president of our local opera guild (currently), member of our university Friends of the School of Music, etc. I'm married to a musician who was trained as a soprano (piano minor) and taught music in high schools, privately taught piano, and is currently choir director of a church.

I earned my living as an aviator, first in the military forces and then as a pilot for an international airline before taking an early retirement option some years ago, so have lots of time to engage in my hobbies, which besides the aforementioned includes photography and photo editing, physical fitness, computers (primarily for the photo editing and listening to music on sites like BBC 3), and operating a couple of web sites.

I've been listening to BBC 3 for as long as I have been able to access their programs on my computer, and I appreciate the opportunities they provide me for enjoying the Proms and their other programming. Up until this year the bitrates and reception have been pretty dismal, but the 64 kbps that I (usually) receive this season is a vast improvement. In the best of all possible worlds, BBC 3 would allow us in other countries to subscribe, perhaps for a fee approximating the license (or licence) fee that British subjects pay, and use the proceeds to increase the bitrate. Many of us have suggested that to the BBC, but thus far it hasn't happened.

And finally, I reside in the southeastern U. S., near where I was born, after a career in which I lived in various & sundry locations such as Kansas, Missouri and California. Prior to that during my 12 years of military service I spent time in places like Maine, New Hampshire, Newfoundland, Labrador, Iceland, Greenland, (French) Morocco, England, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc. Of course, my airline job required travel over much of the world, but both my wife and I have no further interest in travel, and are content to remain in our own little domain and enjoy the numerous musical and cultural activities available to us here, with the occasional day trip for something we really want to see or do.

Thanks for making me feel welcome here!

Having spent a fascinating hour reading this thread (I read slowly, so as to properly digest), here's a little more about me than I posted in my introduction.

Meet me today and you'd be forgiven for assuming I come from a reasonably cultured, middle-class background. The truth is much more 'colourful' - a euphemism that hides a great deal. My schooling was inadequate, and both of my schools were closed because they were deemed failures. I was so disillusioned after these experiences that Further and Higher education were a pair of monsters I was happy to hide from in a dead-end retail job for almost a decade. Yet still, I'm regularly asked which university I attended.

An unremarkable 'career' with one of the UK's leading high-street retailers ended when I managed to convince - during a gruelling three-hour interview - a panel of creative types at a London advertising agency that I was worthy of their junior copywriter vacancy. Apparently, I beat more than 600 graduates to one of only two such openings. Fast forward ten years, past awards ceremonies where some of my work won gongs, and my time as Head of Copy with a major London agency, I now work freelance for anyone who'll pay me. Making me a whore, of sorts.

My interest in classical music goes back to orchestral accompaniments on pop records - Kate Bush's music comes to mind here - and began properly with the purchase of a four-CD sampler set in 1991: the 'best of' Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Seventeen years later, I've progressed through 'Smooth Classics at Seven' on Classic FM and my first complete recording (Swan Lake as conducted by John Lanchberry for EMI CfP - not actually 'complete', as two repeats of the main theme got left off, otherwise the performance wouldn't squeeze onto two CDs), to discoveries as diverse as Grechaninov and Glass, Bloch and Boccherini, Respighi and Rawsthorne. My three favourite composers, however, are ever unchanged: Beethoven, Saint-Saens and Sibelius.

Delve into my personal library of recordings - over 2,000 on CD, around 700 as downloads - and you'll quickly form an impression of me as a musical butterfly: an explorative type who hopes, someday, to hear all the 'core' repertoire, but who keeps getting distracted by the next exotic flower (usually, a chance discovery on the radio or in a CD sale of some obscure or lesser-known composer). I hope to 'specialise' in early 20th century British music, but that hope is, as yet, some way off of fulfilment.

And so to me. I'm 35, male, unremarkable in appearance (though women tell me I can sometimes have an intense look in my eyes), and happily married to a woman I met in a forum about cats and their behaviour. We now have two cats, and one wonderful daughter who's almost a year old. The five of us live in Hampshire, southern England, and life, on the whole, is colourful. Only, in a good way now.

Just so you know, I'm relatively ignorant about music from a technical perspective and can't read or write it. But I love it passionately, nonetheless. So much so, I've started a blog in which I review classical CDs from my own collection. This project is in its infancy, so I'll refrain from mentioning its location in cyberspace for the time being.

FK

Thanks Tantris for giving us a glimpse of what lays behind the Avatar. Being the nosey curious type I had sometimes wondered