About the Author - Living in Time

I'm a Virgo with Gemini Moon and Sagittarius rising, born in 1950. A classic mercurial type, I'm involved in writing, editing books, building websites, photography, speaking and broadcasting. I'm an astrologer and historian too. Saturn is prominent in my chart and I'm also very Jupiterian, with Sagittarius rising, four planets in the ninth house and Jupiter in Pisces as the handle of a Bucket. This has moved me to dedicate my life to charitable, spiritual and humanitarian issues - for example, I work in Bethlehem, Palestine, and I've written a book about that, here.

I started learning astrology in 1971 and my life as an astrologer started properly in 1978. Since then I've counselled thousands of people, taught astrology and researched areas of astrology that interest me - mainly timecycles, as in this book and in the Historical Ephemeris. I was the founder of the astrology camps in UK, starting in Glastonbury in 1984. I was most active in astrology in the 1980s-90s, but you never really stop being an astrologer, and I still use it in my humanitarian and political work in the Middle East and in other contexts. I still do astrological sessions on request.

It all started out because I was a young hippy in the 1960s, taking psychedelics and exploring the meaning of life, and also because, after going to university (London School of Economics), I was deeply disappointed in the psychology and social sciences I learned there. It was geared toward fitting people into the economic system, not toward a greater understanding of the human psyche and the human condition - and fitting society to that.

Then there were the psychedelics - these started my spiritual awakening. I couldn't figure out why, if I took exactly the same amount of exactly the same kind of LSD, each trip would be radically different. Something else must be at work, thought I. This is what prompted me to start thinking about the nature of time.

I met an American astrologer who gave me an astrological session, and it blew me away. How could this woman from Kansas (called Evie Grow) know that much about me when she'd only just met me? Before long, I was ploughing through astrology books - the main one being Dane Rudhyar's pioneering and seminal work, The Astrology of Personality. I started studying transits of the planets to my astrological chart. This quickly became a core element in my self-discovery process.

Moving from London to the mountains of Wales in 1972, I studied astrology intensively while there. Later, living in Sweden from late 1974 onwards, I was hesitant (being a Saturnine Virgo, too aware of my imperfections) to start practising as an astrologer until a friend came along saying "Here's some money and my birth data, and I'm returning tomorrow for a session with you!". That shocked me - it was my Saturn Return and I wasn't feeling too confident at the time - but the session went well, and I continued from there.

By 1984, back in UK, I started the living astrology camps (and educational camps on other holistic subjects too), initially in Glastonbury. The astrology camps continued for years, in various incarnations, later run by others. Then in 1986 I was asked by Alick Bartholomew at Gateway Books to write an astrology book. This became the book Living in Time. The book sold quite well (3,000 copies) and later went out of print, and I still received quite a few e-mails about it in the 2010s. I realised a new edition was needed. For some reason, no one had done a book improving on or replacing mine. So the 2014 book Power Points in Time, a rewrite and update of Living in Time, came out, published by Penwith Press.

As a historian interested in world change and how it happens, I compiled the Historical Ephemeris, published in 1993. Much of the work was done in 1989-90 with the computer assistance of Neil Michelson and Rob Hand in USA, and Nancy Lavoie in Cape Cod, Massachussetts.

By the late 1990s I was becoming more involved in humanitarian and peacebuilding work and my astrological work slipped to the side, though it was still active. Nevertheless, in getting to grips with the complexities of the Middle East and the issues that arise when I'm there, I still used astrology as an intelligence-gathering tool.

I hope you enjoy Living in Time - and/or its printed reincarnation as Power Points in Time - and find them useful.

Best wishes from me