I play two Ibanez S540s from Ibanez Guitars, which are easily the best guitars I have ever played. One of them is off-the-shelf, but for the other I have had a custom neck built. This has a scalloped fretboard, which most players hate, and was done for me by one of Jeff's luthiers at Machinehead Music in Hitchin, England. If you like ordinary necks, I'd take a look at the Ibanez site - their instruments really are first-rate. Notably, Ritchie Blackmore and Yngwie J. Malmsteen (the 'J' is essential for unambiguous identification) both had their fretboards scalloped, which is where I first came by the idea. Steve Vai's Jem series instruments had the top four frets scalloped. The idea is, you scoop the wood between the frets into a curve, a millimetre or two in depth, so that the fingertips do not rest on the wood while fingering the strings. If you employ a firm, ham-fisted grip on the strings, you'll bend them out of tune, but if you have the control you can feel and grip the strings much better. You also suffer virtually no friction across the fingerboard, making vibrato and string bending a breeze. The unmodified Ibanez neck, on the other hand, is fast and comfortable, with a really smooth action. The action of a neck is the distance between the strings and the top of the frets, but guitarists tend to use the word as a general description of the neck's "feel". By and large, the lower the action the faster the neck, but a very low action "fouls' the strings as they vibrate, spoiling the tone, and the slight camber of most necks will choke the strings as you bend them.

The necks I prefer also have a satin finish, with hardly any varnish for sweaty fingers to stick to, and a dead flat ebony fingerboard with fat, Gibson-type frets. The hardness of the ebony gives more sustain and a brighter, if thinner note, while the thick frets are easier to feel without looking. The flat camber is helpful when using wide string bends - if you bend a string at about the 12th to 14th fret on a traditional, curved Strat fretboard, you tend to pull the string down towards the frets higher up, killing the tone or even choking the note out altogether.

Ibanez use a Floyd Rose licenced locking tremolo, these days the de facto industry standard. The name tremolo is something of a turkey, considering that its purpose is to provide vibrato, but the Floyd's engineering is second to none. The strings are clamped in place just behind the nut, and just past where they pass over the bridge, leaving no room for the string to slide and then stick, altering the tension of the free length of string and thus losing intonation. The metals are also very hard, providing great stability, and come in a choice of chrome, black chrome or, as in the case of my S540, gold-plated. The bridge is pivoted around two bolts, with the tension in the strings balanced out by springs hidden within the body. Many of the effects heard in post-Hendrix rock guitar are owed to the tremolo's capacity to bend the strings up or down, providing a range of effects from almost any breadth of vibrato to dive-bombs and an almost vocal control over the pitch of a note. The combination of tremolo arm use and earsplitting harmonics are trademarks of players such as Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and myself, he said modestly.

hotography

For much of my adult life my defining passion, I devoted several years to building a wildlife photographic portfolio. I did in fact manage to get a number of shots and articles published in Amateur Photographer magazine, but I've pretty much given up hope of becoming a full-time Pro, as once was my dream. There are too many competent photographers out there prepared to do the work simply to see it published, and it's very difficult to undercut people who work for free. However, I still have the kit and the interest, so expect to see a few more shots published in the future. I also have a couple of hundred pictures with the BBC Wildlife Unit 's picture library in Bristol, and the same number in the vaults of Amateur Photographer.

I use a Nikon FM2 and a Benbo Mark II tripod, together with a variety of add-ons and lighting gear. One of my published articles was about the Vivitar 283 flash, my main working flash for field-work.

To see a sample of my shots, click here.

eading Matter

Bit of a mishmash, this one, but here goes ...

I read a combination of fiction and non-fiction. In the non-fiction stakes, I read about evolutionary theory, in the guise of Steven Jay Gould , Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley and John Maynard Smith. I also like to read about various branches of philosophy, an interest which was aroused when I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'm trying to plough my way through Kant's Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) in German at the moment, but that's more a lifetime ambition than casual reading.

As far as fiction is concerned, I am a great follower of Terry Pratchett, probably the best humourist and fantasist writing in English today. I also read a lot of Iain Banks at the moment, and used to follow Stephen King until he started publishing books a chapter at a time. Daily paperswise, I read the Grauniad, as well as being an avid New Scientist fan, a very informative mag for lay science.

anguages

I lived for three-and-a-half years in Osnabrück in Germany, not too far from the Dutch border, and used to speak fluent and idiomatic German, although I'm getting a little lazy about remaining in practice. In fact, I can almost grasp conversation in Plattdeutsch, a horrific regional language similar to Dutch which is spoken in northwest Germany. I was once told by Germans that my accent was distinctly platt. Imagine a German coming to England and speaking broad Geordie and you'll get some idea of the effect. If this seems an excessive claim, bear in mind that I was not only fully immersed in the culture for over three years but that I also had the advantage of 'O'-level German and a previous German girlfriend before I went. Then I lived in Basel for two years and developed a Swiss accent. Now I'm living on the Bodensee and am becoming a very confused individual.

Although Osnabrück is a garrison town with about 17,000 British soldiers, I went there partly to work on my wildlife photography in an environment where wages are high enough to make only working half the year possible, and partly to work on my German, so I avoided mixing with my own nationality for the most part. The result was that I could almost pass for a native if I spoke with Germans coming from sufficiently far from Osnabrück that my regional accent drowns out my english one. I'm hoping to get back to that again!

My French is a somewhat more sorry story. My conversational French has been sorely neglected since I left school. Although I can get by in bars and supermarkets, I'm not about to win any prizes for French literature.

I now have a half-share with my parents in a gîte, also in Bretagne, which I spent part of 1999 living in and helping to renovate. The property consists of several buildings, some woodland and a small lake, and will hopefully serve as a retreat when I'm finally rich and shameless.

My current passions are Arabic, in my eyes and ears one of the world's most beautiful languages, and Italian, the language of food! Unfortunately, it's not that easy to come by courses on Arabic in the Southwest, although I have high hopes for some of the teaching software that I've seen advertised on the Web. Trying to learn a language like Arabic out of a book is an exercise in futility. Italian is a bit easier, because there are Italians in most European cities running restaurants and because I live close enough to visit a friend in Ligurai now and again.

ookery

I have a long-standing love of cooking, particularly Indian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican and Italian. Oddly, though I can turn out highly sohisticated multi-course Indian meals, I have very limited skills in simple areas like baking. This section is a new addition, and will expand over the coming months to include some recipes and links to food sites. For now, though, that's it!