Roger Noble

Many years ago I haunted the inky pages of Sunday papers nakedly exhorting mothers to use Lifeguard soap but I have since withdrawn from such public endorsements. I spent the formative years of my twenties living on a kibbutz in Galilee. That’s where I really started writing - though I thought of it as a quirk.

Later, in Jerusalem, I studied Psychology, and worked in a Language School - in what was, then, a very mixed city. I met many different people. Writing then was like assembling a cast of characters.

Back in England in my thirties, I trained as a clinical psychologist, I got married and grew a couple of artists and scientists - and remembered the good old days. Writing was an avoidance activity.

In Brighton, working with people with Learning Disabilities, writing was a way of expressing my anger at the System.

When I wrote a D.Phil thesis on Logic Programming, writing was a displacement activity.

Dragged back into Clinical Psychology, in an increasingly chaotic and shrinking NHS, I began to realise that I was actually a writer.

So now that's what I do, when I'm not discovering the riches of radical yiddish writings and posting obscurely captioned photos on social media.