About

Sometimes life takes a turn for the unexpected. And sometimes it takes a whole pile of them together. By a mixture of fate, accident and design I find myself living a modern crofting lifestyle, or a form of pluralism to use a phrase I heard recently. With, depending on how you count them, around five to eight jobs and a similar number of side projects and interests life doesn’t lack in variety. It does however sometimes get rather busy, and occasionally a little confusing! The pandemic does appear to have simplified these somewhat, but maybe normal service will return in due course.

This website is to some extent an attempt to pull all of these things together. I find myself writing more and while the dance and finance stuff have their own sites, this pulls together anything else I feel like doing. So here, in no particular order, are my current work projects.

  • BM Research, a finance & investment consultancy. My main employer just now is Hardman & Co, for who I write investment research the tax-advantaged venture capital market – EIS, VCTs and Business Relief products – and financial companies. All independent financial writing goes on the BM Research Blog.
  • salsaflix.tv is an ecommerce business streaming salsa DVD/video content. As well as some great instructional material, it has free performance videos and a blog. Sadly this project didn’t work out.
  • Baile Escocia is my dance brand under which I do a variety of things:
    • Agency, primarily for tango teachers and musicians.
    • Salsa teaching: for Edinburgh University Salsa Society since it started in 2008.
    • Salsa DJing: primarily at the monthly Fiesta Latina, the best night in town (other people’s words, not mine!)
    • Argentine Tango teaching: have restarted teaching thanks to Julieta Pineda for Edinburgh University Tango Society
    • Events: Co-organised the successful Cafe Baile, a dance compilation show, in the for four years in the Fringe, which was latterly a sell out and also run some ad-hoc gigs for bands.
  • Examiner for the Actuarial Profession. If you like statistics I gave this up back in 2018, but hope to return at some point.

For fun

And for fun these are the specific projects, though there’s usually some other stuff going on in the background.

  • I’m the founder and co-organiser of the Edinburgh International Tango Festival. Currently we’re on a break, and not sure how long that will be.
  • Had various Scouting roles, incuding working with Explorer Scouts and Young Leaders and, most recently, on the Board for Scouts Scotland. Seem to be having a break from this too!
  • I have been involved with Child and Youth Finance International through Bankers without Borders, which I am a member of the financial modelling reserve corp.
  • I also like walking, diving, reading, cycling (a bit) and have recently got into paddle boarding. Some evidence of the latter can be found here and maybe some of the others will crop up too.

Having just written that I have the feeling I’ve forgotten something! There’s various other interests that will crop up here, but you can pick those up as I go along!