Tim Trent

Tim Trent is an English author who writes to rid himself of his demons. Well, that's a great start, isn't it? But his demons do appear in his writing, not least of which in his first work, 'Queer Me!'. If you want to learn more about the hothouse of his imagination in his teenage years, this is a dramatised, fictionalised diary of his time at a great British Public School clinging to chalk downland. The school did the clinging. Hmm. So did Tim. He was born in 1952 in London, by all accounts a lovely little boy, and grew up the only child in the Worcester Park home where his father, a refugee from Vienna, Hitler, and the Holocaust, had Immigrant Syndrome. He strove to be more English than the English. His mother was an English Rose, and he was much loved, though it never quite felt that way, for it was without tangible affection. His was a strangely privileged childhood, granted to him by his struggling middle class family who clung on to solvency by their fingertips. Imagine his shock to discover he had fallen in love with another 13 year old boy very soon after he moved to Public School in 1965. He deals with that shock, the horror of it, in 'Queer Me!' He achieved failing his BSc in Metallurgy at Birmingham University in grand style. Tim loved technical theatre, and he put fun above academe by spending his time as a lighting and stage managing kid, and not really a being student at all. When he typed that sentence autocorrect altered his miskeying of 'fun' as 'ruin'. It seems his Freudian Slips follow him everywhere. His first full time job was as a Civil Servant. It wasn't great to be homosexual in the 1975 UK Civil Service, and stress over concealing his real self meant he hid from himself as well as the world. That was not helped by his move to the harsh and unpleasant world of the nascent computer industry where he worked for US corporations variously as a support agent, a trainer, a salesman, and a marketing bloke. Retiring at the age of 57 was a blessed relief. He was very lucky to fall for a lovely and pretty girl in October 1978, real love, proposed to her a week later, and has been married to her ever since Bastille Day in 1979. They have a son, a lovely daughter in law, and two gorgeous granddaughters. He loves boats and sailing. In his retirement he teaches sailing and powerboating for a South Devon charity which takes folk with disabilities afloat and helps put fun and managed risk into lives that might not have any otherwise. He ran a charter boat for a while and has a part time job for his local harbour authority ferrying people to and from their boats. He always wanted to be a professional waterman since he taught kids to sail on the Thames at Surbiton as as a late teenager. Now he is. A Waterman, not a teenager.