I'm a 31 year old Englishman living in Brighton (UK). I work as a tutor, learning support assistant, and (apparently) head of assessments at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute (FE), helping 16-19 year old music students (especially those who are neurodivergent or have an additional learning need) deal with the nonsensical academia on their courses. This is because I LOVE nonsensical academia. They're closing that down now though, so I suppose I'll be doing something else soon.

When travelling, I like to see everything and do everything, but in particular I'm interested in human beings and their habits and cultures. I like to experience as much of the music, food, theatre, and life of wherever I go as much as I can.

Travelling in the past, I found that I'm more of an English stereotype than I thought, from the eccentricity to the awkward politeness to the love of tea and Marmite. I would sometimes feel homesick and miss the taste of malt vinegar when the skies looked particularly wet and grey or trains turned up late.

The hobbies I spend the most time on at home are playing bass (often with my band The Display Team), going to the gym, tabletop roleplay (e.g. dungeons and dragons), videogames, performing stand-up comedy, and putting together stupid outfits for the silly theme parties I insist on hosting all the time.

I'm very keen to get back out travelling and meeting people after a long few years stuck in England!

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

About seven years ago, when I was finishing my year of teaching English in Samho (Jeollanamdo, South Korea), I was planning to go travelling for a few months and see how far my savings would get me. Some friends suggested I use couchsurfing. Because of this suggestion, I had the absolute time of my life.

I feel like staying with locals is the best possible way to travel. Beyond that, I feel like people willing to offer space in their homes for free are some of the best people one could hope to meet.

Interests

I like learning things, and I don't really mind what. As long as there are pub quizzes and long conversations in this world, pointless trivia has a point.

I love intense music, trash movies, spicy food, RPGs/strategy games, dungeons and dragons, lifting weights, and anything else which it seems like I might be able to nerd out about.

• pub crawls
• anime
• trivia
• traveling
• socializing
• music
• guitar
• backpacking
• geography
• history
• food
• videogames
• comedy

Music, Movies, and Books

I'm most interested by things that are weird and (at least initially) confusing, particularly in the case of music; that doesn't apply to everything, of course. Favourite artists include:
- Cardiacs
- Captain Beefheart
- Magma
- Betty Davis
- D'Angelo
- The Monks
- eX-girl
- Koenji Hyakkei
And more others than I could possibly begin to list, but my tastes are pretty broad. I've been through big phases of obsession with P-Funk, 50s rock'n'roll, hip-hop, etc etc etc.

With movies, I have a big thing for comically bad movies. I own a DVD copy of The Room signed by both Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero, as well as a script signed by Tommy. It took me about a week after I saw Cats (2019) to stop laughing to myself every few seconds. I also really like lots of anime, because I am (still) weeaboo trash - Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is probably my favourite anime movie.

I used to read tons of Terry Pratchett when I was young, but unfortunately my love of reading was cut short by a copy of Final Fantasy VII, so I'll just talk about videogames instead. I love RPG games and strategy games. I have about 1300 hours on Europa Universalis IV from back when I was unemployed, and I really enjoyed Final Fantasy, Mass Effect, The Witcher, Pokemon, etc. These days I carry my trusty Switch when travelling and have my Xbox Series X and gaming-capable PC at home; I don't find as much time as I'd like to play on any of them.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

To me, it felt pretty amazing to sing drunken karaoke in a hotel bar in Pyeongyang. I'll leave it up to others to decide what is and isn't amazing when it comes up in conversation, though.

Teach, Learn, Share

I guess I could teach someone to play a stringed, fretted instrument like a guitar, or a bass, or a ukulele or something. I tend to jabber on about anything else I know about, if any of my other interests seem like something you'd want to learn about.

I enjoy the idea of being taught anything and everything (that doesn't require me to be good at maths).

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, China, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Netherlands, North Korea, Norway, Romania, Spain, Thailand, Viet Nam

Countries I’ve Lived In

South Korea, United Kingdom