Where to begin? Perhaps the advice to Alice in Alice in Wonderland is best: “Begin at the beginning, go onto the end, and then stop.” So —

I went to a secondary modern school. Today that sounds a bit fancy as a name for a school. Actually it’s the opposite: I went there, as you did in 1953, if you failed the eleven plus exam (sometimes called the “scholarship”) in school. If I’d passed it I’d have gone to a grammar school, which was supposed to be better and was thought of as posher. Well, Bounds Green Secondary Modern School may not have been posh but it had a school orchestra and I learned to play the violin. (My music interests expanded later, of course, and even include enjoying two French singers, Renaud and Thiefaine.) My roaring success in exams, however, was followed by another one: I managed to leave school at 15 without taking any GCE exams (roughly the equivalent of today’s GCSEs). I was only any good at two subjects at school — English and French — so the local employment adviser sent me off to a law printers to learn proofreading. That was lucky. I’ve kept proofreading, with gaps while I did other things, and I’m still at it.

I worked as a bookshop assistant, and I was the minister of a church for two years. To do that I went to the Bible Training Institute in Glasgow and managed to partly break my habit of failing all exams: I passed the college diploma exams but failed the London University Diploma in Theology. (It probably needs to be said that today I’m a practising, but tolerant, atheist!) While I was at the college I also managed to begin the process of coming out as gay (the most unlikely place to do it, really, in the late 1960s, but that’s what happened!). That led to two more musical likes, Tom Robinson and Rufus Wainwright.

I worked as a telephonist at the international telephone exchange in London, where I was a union rep. I recorded audio books for the blind at the Jewish Blind Society day centre, also in London, where I was a member of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). I worked as an English teacher in Paris, where, again, I was a CGT union rep.

When I came back to London from Paris in 1995, I did my first university course at the University of East London, in European Studies and what was then called Third World Studies. Bad habits over, I got my BA. I then followed it with an MA in Refugee Studies, again at UEL. When I moved to Hull in 2003 I signed up for a PhD on the treatment of asylum seekers in the UK and France and got it in 2010. That’s why I blog on immigration and asylum. I want to see the new policy announced by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, that targets asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants for punishment, repealed, binned and burned.

In politics, I was a member of the Labour Party (twice) and of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) (twice). I no longer belong to any political party.

I read a lot.