(Photo taken at Loch Ness)I was born in Yorkshire on the second of December 1958 in the town of Castleford - once a famous Roman fort and also the birthplace of sculptor Henry Moore. I now live with Sue in the ancient village of Fairburn in a cottage overlooking a well known nature reserve (well known in Northern England) made up of marshland, lakes and woods. I've always been deeply interested in natural history (especially birds) and conservation, so this is ideal.
To give you some idea of the area... Fairburn is about twenty minutes from medieval York and the Yorkshire Dales - James Herriot country and one of our favourite places. The North York Moors and the coast are a hour away. The British drama "Heartbeat" is filmed thirty minutes up the road. In the opposite direction and another thirty minutes you come to the waterfalls where Kevin Costner fought Little John and bared his butt to Maid Marrion in "Prince of Thieves."
After school and brief stints in the police and Royal Marines, I formed a small mail order company dealing in books, incenses and occult paraphernalia before joining the West Yorkshire Fire Service in 86. My friend and partner (Clive Barrett) continued in the business for a while afterwards and he has since become an established designer of Tarot cards - Norse gods and Ancient Egyptian. I now work for the British Fire Service.
Films are one of my big hobbies, but it's difficult to watch anything absorbing or complicated like "The Usual Suspects" in a fire station with people talking and making coffee and the knowledge that at any second you could be called out. The wife and I visit the cinema a lot, mostly to see the bigger movies with dinosaurs, volcanoes and exploding spaceships, whilst the likes of courtroom dramas and cop movies are rented on video. I have a huge collection of tapes and am now really starting to annoy Sue as I begin to pine for DVD.
A big interest of mine, as you've probably guessed, is the paranormal and most things supernatural and Fortean. I collect urban myths and over the years have visited most of the supernatural sites in Britain. Since the late seventies I've also met many of the British personalities (both crazy and serious) in the field - in some cases (Ray Sherwin) becoming good friends.
Sue and I love to travel and see the world, mostly using budget flights and public transport with minimum luggage. We don't believe in wasting time sunbathing, (we also burn incredibly easily) but move around seeing the sights, the history and birdwatching, snorkeling and diving. We've visited the Unites States twice - our first visit taking in California, New York state, Arizona and Nevada, and the second visit to the Florida Everglades and the Keys. Other countries we have traveled in are Kenya, Cuba, Cyprus, Holland, Greece, France, Israel, the Dominican Republic and Egypt. There is so much world to see that, however much we like a place, we rarely visit it twice. Egypt is quite different and we will definitely return again and again. A friend of ours married and moved to Thailand a few years ago (a wonderful country filled with wonderful people) and we also break our rule by flying out there every year to live with him and travel around the jungles, coral reefs and tiger reserves. This year we are also crossing into Cambodia for a few days to see the huge temple complex of Angkor Wat.
Sue is a chef, although, for the past six years she has traveled around Britain selling handmade fudges and toffees at shows and exhibitions in London and such places (that is what we were doing in Lincoln before Christmas).
Over the past few years I have begun writing novels although I've yet to see one published. The first, Winter Solstice, was a surreal black comedy about a series of murders centering around a dermatology clinic. The main character is an unconventional middle-aged private detective called Lewis Pine - a contemporary Sherlock Holmes.
I don't know how difficult it is to get a book published in the States, but here it is far from easy. Most agents and publishers return a synopsis unread, but out of the few that read the full manuscript, two were interested, but said it was far too surreal and hard to categorise. One did however say that if I wrote a straightforward horror with lashings of sex and violence he would be very interested...so guess what I am hard at work on at the moment.
Here is an experience I had at Borley
Ian Jarvis