I grew up in a small French town near the Jura mountains, across the border from Geneva, Switzerland. It had a church, a town hall, a cafe, a few shops, a school, an orphanage and a manor house. The manor house used to belong to the founder of the village, a notorious gold smuggler called Voltaire. We lived in an apartment on a small modern estate surrounded by greenery. There was a playground nearby where considerate adults used to drop their cigarette butts, free of charge. I remember that at the age of 3, I picked a fresh one up and inhaled deeply...and never smoked a cigarette again! In front of our block of flats there was a field with a bull in it and a tree with low branches. One day, when I thought the bull was away, I climbed over the fence into the field and then, after finding out that the bull was in fact there, I ran for my life and thanked my lucky stars for that tree.

When I was 8 years old, having moved to a new school in the south of France, I asked my classmates to line up against a wall in the playground, and announced that we would be organising a revolution. "Who wants to join?" Everyone did! We weren’t really sure what we were revolting against, apart from a vague plan to take over running the school, but the idea was so grand, I was carried aloft in triumph on the shoulders of my fellow pupils, to the utter amazement of the teachers, who watched from the sidelines without interfering. The aftermath of the revolution was carefully organised, with members holding different coloured cardboard badges according to rank, but it fell apart a few weeks later after I proposed to charge a weekly tax so that we might "fund projects". Only one boy, Cristian, one of the most high-ranking members, brought his pocket money to school, but I of course didn’t take it, and the revolution faded away.

When I was 16, the family moved back to England, where I did well at school, thanks to having been brought up in the English language by my mother. I used to do stand-up comedy, after hours, and I got several standing ovations, especially when I ran out of material and began to crudely mock the headmaster, who was in the audience and took it surprisingly in his stride.

I went on to study Law at Cambridge University, but my tutors didn’t think I had what it takes to be a lawyer, which is either a shame or a blessing, depending on how you look at it. I spent the next couple of decades trying to make sense of life, living in different parts of London, then in France, Belgium and Austria, before coming back to London and finally to Cambridge just before the Covid pandemic.

During that time, I worked as a market research interviewer, as a boat hand in a London park, as a minicab driver, a computer programmer, a translator, a copywriter and a journalist. In 1999, at the height of the Internet bubble, while working part-time in the park on £3 per hour, I founded a start-up and almost became a billionaire. It was a near miss, a case of either billionaire or nothing, and the word ‘almost’ says it all, but it was a great adventure.

In recent years, after living off past glories for ages as an armchair politician and strategist, with the walls as the only audience of my rambling speeches (thank goodness), I volunteered as a school governor in 2021, and began playing an active part in local issues, working tirelessly to promote awareness and opposition to a huge planned development in the neighbourhood. In July 2023 I helped out in a successful local by-election campaign in Kings Hedges, Cambridge. In October 2023 I stood as a candidate for one of the big national parties in a city council by-election in the Queen Edith’s ward, learning the ropes. I then decided to follow the advice of many of the people I spoke to there, and stand in the next local elections as an independent candidate for the Cambridge ward where I live: Newnham.

No biography is complete without a section on the person’s hobbies. Well, when I am not wasting my free time, I spend it reading, socialising, arguing with members of my family, playing the trumpet and writing short stories. For exercise, and to make a change from sitting in my armchair, I go jogging, I cycle or walk everywhere, and occasionally have a swim. Like many fellow residents of this city, I dream of sitting in a deckchair on a sandy beach somewhere on a warm sunny day...