I was born in a nursing home in Newport, Monmouthshire in March 1939. My parents were not youngsters - my mother was born in 1899 and my father in 1909 - but they had married about eighteen months before. He was a bank clerk, and she was a reasonably gifted musician (piano). His antecedents were from the Swansea area, very independent and "comfortably off", but his father and mother lived in Newport. They were frail in health, both dying when he was quite young, leaving a family of two boys and a girl (another boy had died through the crass incompetence of the medical profession). The surviving children were farmed out to uncles and aunts, and grew up separately. My father went to a minor public school (Taunton School) and after finishing there was required to earn his own living. He entered the service of Lloyds Bank, and stayed there the rest of his life. He seemed to suffer that reasonably well, though he chafed at not being promoted to Manager as soon as he should have been. There were reasons for that, no doubt. After returning from War Service (he spent some five years in the RAF) he found it comfortable to be "one of the lads" in the society of the mining town where we lived, being bosom pals with some of the local business men and being the Treasurer of the local Rugby Team (Abertillery RFC). My mother found it much more difficult. She was the only child of a mid-Wales family, her father being the local Sergeant of Police in Rhayader (Radnorshire). He developed rheumatoid arthritis and she had to return home from a promising early career as a musical student and piano accompanist in London to look after him and her rather helpless mother. She met my father when he was posted to the local Bank branch and they married when her father died. She felt totally out of place in a South Wales mining town, with a very small circle of friends whom she considered to be "good enough" to fraternise with. The town in those days was a hotbed of malignant socialism (the only two local political parties with any support were the Labour Party and Labour Reform!). The other side of that coin, however, was that it had a very strong musical side, which at least allowed my mother to use her talents.

I was a sickly child, being born with congenital cataracts on both eyes and infantile diabetes. Those were early days in the treatment of cataracts and the experimental surgery on my eyes, which continued until I was nine years old, was botched. I have had limited vision ever since, though good enough for most purposes until an internal haemorrhage in my right eye in the early 1980s. Apart from a six month polio-type infection when I was eleven I have otherwise had remarkably good health. However, my early years were effectively spent confined either to the house or to hospital. My school days were not happy. I did not have much contact with my father, who was always out and interested mainly in sport, which I loathed. I did not get on well with my mother.

Things began to look up when I came to the end of my secondary schooling. I needed to get away from home and my parents, but it was not that easy. The route I tried first was a short service commission in the Army. Those were the days when there was still National Service, and I reasoned that if I was going to have two years in the Army anyway it made sense to take a short service commission for five years, with the added benefit that it gave me independence. All went well until the very last moment. The final stage was a rigorous medical at an Army Hospital. No problem in my physical condition, but when they saw the record of the polio infection seven years before, that was it: Grade III, not acceptable. So I had to move to "Plan B". That was to take the Open Competition for the Civil Service. I passed that, and was appointed to the Home Office. I left home one crisp frosty morning at the end of March 1958 and never looked back. I stayed in the Civil Service for the major part of my career.

London has changed an enormous amount since 1958 in almost every way. It was very much cheaper then, of course, but wages were also relatively low. I earned just enough to keep me in board and lodging in a London Hostels Association hostel just off Gloucester Road: seven shillings and six pence was normally left over each week, with which I was able to buy a Saturday night meal at the local Italian Restaurant (still there). But life in the capital was vibrant - anything was possible.

I was ecstatic at being on my own at last. The picture on the left was taken on an outing to Brighton with friends from the office. I also made friends at the local Congregational Church in Kensington, where I became a deacon (though I had been baptised in the Church in Wales - Anglican - this didn't seem to matter in free-wheeling London). In the church there was quite a gang of young people, and one of them, Clare, and I became very friendly. I knew I was gay, always had been, and she knew that too. However, at the time the societal pressures were enormous and we decided to get married. A great mistake, but there we are. We were together for three years but then split up, and divorced three years after that. She went to live in Canada where she married again, and I have never heard from her or of her since. I regret that she was hurt by our joint foolishness in getting married: I should have been strong enough to avoid it, but in those days things were different. We married in 1960 in her home town of Dawlish. I reproduce below a couple of photos from that occasion. They are poor quality unfortunately, but they are important to me. Apart from us, note my best man, Martin - where are you now Martin? Note also my father lighting up a cigarette in the right hand corner of that photo. The other photo shows the two pairs of parents with the bride and groom.

Fast forward now, through the wonderful Sixties, the challenging seventies, the rather miserable eighties and the perplexing nineties. Through those years I had two long-term relationships whilst in my career I did many things, including personal casework, policy formulation, union and employer relations, indirect taxation, operational management, financial management, general management, consultancy, and negotiation - in half a dozen different Government Departments. At the end of the sixties my parents were involved in a car accident in South Wales. My father was killed and my mother badly injured. After some months in hospital the doctors solemnly told me she could not live more than six months and that she must come and live with me. I said "no way", and added that they didn't know my mother. I was right: she lived another twenty years exactly, dying on the precise anniversary of the accident in 1989. However, I had to provide for her and so I had a bungalow built in her home town and moved her into it. For the next twenty years I drove to and from it almost every weekend.

In the nineties the Cabinet Office and the British Council asked me to undertake some short-term assignments whilst still carrying on my usual "day job", which at that time was in the Department of Health. I organised residential courses for foreign senior civil servants and politicians, and I undertook some short-term advisory assignments in Namibia, South Africa and Colombia. At the end of 1994 the Government of Namibia invited me to become Chairman of a special Commission set up to review the pay and structure of the public service there, from the President downwards. I took early retirement from the UK Civil Service to do this, and spent three years in Namibia. That marked the start of a new and important phase of my life.

When I was in Namibia on one of my short-term assignments I had briefly met Stefan Klaazen. When I settled there for a longer stint at the beginning of 1995 we met again, and became better acquainted. Without sounding like a Mills & Boon novel, dear reader, we clicked. We have been together ever since.

Towards the end of our time in Namibia the President, rather to everyone's surprise, started fulminating against gays. He seems to have some sort of infatuation with the evil Robert Mugabe, and repeats whatever that idiot says. We decided that living in Namibia was losing its attraction, and moved to Europe. Windhoek to London was a bit too drastic a change, so we moved half way, to the South of Spain. I have a cousin who has lived there for very many years and so we settled in the town where she lives, Fuengirola. Spain has a great deal to commend it, but there is no denying that the South coast suffers somewhat from the mass migration into it from Northern Europe. Nonetheless we were reasonably happy there, except that we could not get the Spanish authorities to grant Stefan a residence visa. That is a long story in itself, which I shall not go into here. In the end, after two years, we decided to retrench to London where I had kept my flat (fortunately). That is where we have been ever since and now seem likely to stay for the rest of our days.

Though retired, I now seem to be as busy as ever. After returning to London I was appointed to the Bench in 2002, and sit in a Magistrates Court about once a week (the Court of first instance for criminal cases). I am also honorary secretary of two small charities which take up a lot of time. One is the Heraldry Society, which has the nature of a learned society dedicated to heraldry, chivalry and allied subjects. My interest in this started with my genealogical research which I began about twenty-five years ago. I have a genealogical site setting out the results of my research, but I have not applied myself to that for some time now. In 1994 I was honoured by admission to the Most Honourable Order of the Bath as a Companion, and at the same time granted arms: these are the subject of another web-site I have created at http://www.meljeremiah.com. The second charity is The Friends of the City Churches, which is dedicated to keeping open to the public the Churches in the City of London. I am involved in other things to do with the City of London, of which I am a freeman and liveryman of a Livery Company. Finally I am President of the International Association of Amateur Heralds. I was in at the foundation of that body and was its Secretary for several years.