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9781904871941

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Phil was born and raised in rural Cheshire. His father was the local painter, decorator and odd-job bloke, his cousins and uncles were mostly in the building trade and his mother worked in a builder's office, so he picked up a lot of skills working weekends and school holidays and hanging around with builders. Phil trained as a Design Technology teacher, specialising in the more technical end of that wide ranging subject and working in a wide range of different schools. He also wrote a number of educational textbooks. In 1998 he went to work for an educational CAD/CAM software company providing tech support for teachers in the form of user guides, training manuals and so on. Since 2006 he has worked as a freelance writer. He says he had written from childhood, but school and college almost cured him. As an adult it remained a guilty secret until he was sufficiently angered by education policy to write a piece for the Times Educational Supplement. That led to further work in various educational journals, and eventually to regular features in computer magazines and elsewhere. What ties these disparate jobs together is that Phil likes finding out how things work and explaining them to other people. This is his third DIY book and his first for The Good Life Press. Phil and his wife Linda have lived in seven different houses in Surrey, Lancashire, Cambridgeshire, Shropshire and Denbighshire and many have needed a lot of DIY inside and out, and extensive work in the gardens. Their current, and says Phil their last, house in Llangollen, North Wales, which they moved to in 1998, was the worst of the lot, but by far the best too. The garden is large, very steep and composed mainly of unstable rock and weeds. It is the inspiration for Phil's latest book, Wood, Brick and Stone, and many of the photos show work he and Linda have undertaken, but the skills are widely applicable even if your garden is flat. Phil and Linda have two grown up daughters and are expecting their first grandchild at about the time this book will be published.

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