Age:	65
Profession:	Learning and Development Consultant, but now retired, hooray!
Habitat:	Small village near Bristol, England.
Highest qualification:	MSc. in Advanced Learning Technology from Lancaster University.
Interests:	Music, Songwriting, Home Recording, Reading, Film and Cinema, Popular Culture, Drawing, Illustration, Photography, Writing, Science, Computing.
Sports:	Nope.
Sense of humour:	Very left field (i.e. frequently described as "weird"). The reason for this will soon become obvious.
Favourite writers:	William Gibson, Becky Chambers, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Martha Wells, Larry Niven, Ursula Le Guin, Jack Womack, Richard Kadrey, Charlie Stross, Adrian Tchaikovsky, James Gleick, and Ed Regis (to name just a few).
Favourite TV shows:	Horizon, The Sky at Night, Monkey (both the original version and the New Adventures), UFO, Cowboy Bebop, Twin Peaks, Blackadder, Monty Python, Pinky and the Brain, Father Ted, Futurama, Buffy, Warehouse 13, The IT Crowd, Black Books, Star Trek (all of it), Frasier, Lovejoy, Stargate SG-1, Only Murders In The Building, Murderbot, and Babylon 5.
Favourite films:	Buckaroo Banzai, Forbidden Planet, Blade Runner (both the Original and 2049), Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Danger: Diabolik, Inception, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fifth Element, The Day The Earth Stood Still (just the original version, or course), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Wings of Desire, It Came From Outer Space, Big Trouble In Little China, Ghost in the Shell, Ghostbusters, Tron, Flow, Dune (the Villeneuve version, although I still have a fondness for David Lynch's movie), and all of the work of Jacques Tati. Oh, and I'll happily watch any kaiju movie you can find for me, no matter how bad.
Other films I'll always end up watching if I stumble across them while channel surfing:	Diamonds Are Forever, Deadpool, Sneakers, My Neighbour Totoro, The Iron Giant, Communion, Starman, Men In Black, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, The Matrix, This Is Spinal Tap, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and The Princess Bride.
Favourite Podcasts:	The Infinite Monkey Cage, The Life Scientific, The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, Book Shambles with Robin and Josie, The Thrilling Adventure Hour, Tea and Jeopardy, The Art of the Score, A Good Read.
Favourite beverage:	Coffee.
Would spend sudden fortune on:	A larger house with more bookcases and a better home cinema set-up. And an even more kick-ass recording studio.

As you may have realised (especially if you Google me) there are quite a few folks called Chris Harris about. So here are a few details to help you see if you've found who you're looking for.

No, I'm not the speedway rider and Top Gear presenter. I've never been a Texas State Senator. The guy with the domain name is a Canadian wildlife photographer. Furthermore, I would like to state for the record that I have never, at any time, had anything to do with Chris Moyles. I have never been a professional wrestler. Nor am I a New Zealand cricketer. And I wasn't Bristol's famous pantomime dame, either.

These days I'm very much enjoying being a musician and a front-of-house sound engineer and I can normally be found beavering away in my own home recording studio...

...or in someone else's.

Chris with Portishead's Adrian Utley in front of the monster SSL mixing desk in The Big Room at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Box, 2025

Chris tracking bass in the control room at NAM Studios, Wiltshire in 2026

I was born in 1960 in the town of Lytham St. Annes, in Lancashire. Being born on 11th August meant that I got a total solar eclipse for my birthday way back in 1999, which was a once-in-a-lifetime experience in all senses of the word.

I led a depressingly rootless childhood. My family moved about a lot as my father pursued his career and it was unusual for us to stay in one house for more than three years. In the 1970s I went to Burton Manor County Primary school and King Edward VI Grammar school (now the High School) in Stafford. One of my English teachers there was Craig Thomas, who decided to give up teaching shortly afterwards; I couldn't possibly comment on whether his experience teaching us was a deciding factor in that. In the middle of my "A" levels the family was uprooted and we moved to West Wickham, a suburb of London. I finished secondary school at John Newnham High School in Croydon, where one of my classmates was Kirsty MacColl. I was miserable there. I'd lost all of my childhood friends, I felt utterly out of place, and I was extremely lonely. Somehow I still managed to do well enough to get a place at the University I'd chosen, to take physics at Imperial College (which is Brian May's alma mater, kids).

I dropped out of university after a year, because I hated it. My parents couldn't afford to pay for me to move into digs (or—and now I'm pretty sure it's the more likely explanation—my father simply wasn't prepared to pay for them), so instead I commuted from home every day and that was never going to work out. Instead, as the 1980s got under way I found myself working for Post Office Telecommunications in London. By the time the company had become British Telecom, I'd moved to Milton Keynes, where I worked in their training division. For a while I was based in the Mansion at Bletchley Park, which had recently become famous when its role during the war in breaking German military codes finally became public knowledge. I really enjoyed my time there. I met some great people, and I ended up falling head over heels in love with one of them. Heather and I got married a couple of years later but sadly, life in the 90's wasn't as good and a few years after that she walked out. I was utterly devastated, and my life went into free-fall. I ended up taking voluntary redundancy from BT and left my life in Milton Keynes behind forever. It was one of the most painful things I've ever done but it was a decision made from necessity. I'm not exaggerating at all when I say I wouldn't have survived otherwise; as 1994 drew to a close I came very close to taking my own life during a Christmas skiing trip.

Something kept me going; I don't know what it was but the following year I moved to Gloucestershire and apart from regular commutes to Atlanta, Georgia and even a brief stint living and working in Tampa, Florida (it's been a hard life) I've lived here ever since. Moving here resulted in a significant levelling-up of my professional abilities that included going back to university (and this time, I absolutely loved the experience) and once I'd acquired letters after my name, I found myself developing a successful career as a learning and development specialist and training consultant. Since then, I've worked in the public sector, the private sector, and I even spent some time doing postgraduate teaching in academia, which was great fun. It also did wonders for my self-confidence.

Somehow during all of this I managed to make a few sensible decisions which meant that I'd paid off my mortgage just after I turned fifty and I could afford to retire by the time I was sixty. I don't miss working at all. So now I live in a nice house in a small village on the southern edge of the Cotswolds, a little bit north of Bristol, and spend my time making music. I should have moved here years before I actually did. It feels like home in a way that nowhere else I've lived ever has.

I've always known I that I'm not even remotely neurotypical but it wasn't until 2025 that I realised just how different I was. I've moved my account of my neurodivergent journey to a dedicated page, because it was in danger of taking over here.

Here, I'll just say that I have now finally accepted that I'm Autistic. I also have ADHD and a side helping of complex PTSD, which has made my life very difficult. But after sixty-five years, several courses of therapy, and the help of some very good friends I have finally started to find out who the authentic me really is. I can't say I'm optimistic about my future, but at least I now have a workable set of tools to deal with it.

If I was to try and sum myself up in a single word, I'd like to think that the word would be "creative." I've immersed myself in many hobbies over the years, and they have all been connected with the arts in one way or another.

I think this is because I have always desperately needed to be involved in things that made life better in some way. I'm sure that my c-PTSD has been just as instrumental in driving me in that direction as my being Autistic has, because even when I was a small child, if I discovered that doing something helped me to escape, to filter out all the overwhelming stimuli and regulate my overloaded mind, I'd prioritise doing that above everything else to a degree that often flirted with compulsion. Interests became obsessions, and I wanted to be as good as I possibly could be at all of them.

My first means of escape was through drawing. I used to draw a lot—cartoons, portraits and a little graphic design. Not only did it help me cope with the trauma I was experiencing, it also became obvious that it was something that I'd slowly become very good at. And by that, I mean I was good enough to end up doing some work for a few bands, including the rock group Motörhead. For some reason people don't believe this, muttering things like "and he looks so normal..." but it's all true (and I've just realised that comments like that suggest that my ability to "mask" my Autism so that I could fit in to normal society—the behaviour I talked about just now—must have been a lot better than I've been giving myself credit for).

It turns out that for an Autistic person, obsessions come and go and they will often fade away to nothing—sometimes over years, but sometimes in the space of just a few hours. As I got older, my preferred means of distraction and escape switched from drawing to sex, and to drinking, and increasingly to music. But these days, my drawing board is set up in the conservatory and I've started sketching again. I've put together a graphics page about some of the stuff I've produced over the years.

My greatest obsession will always be music. Nothing else comes close. I enjoy listening to all styles, from classical to heavy rock, from pop to electronica. I'm not sure "enjoy" is sufficiently hyperbolic to describe the effect that music has on me. In her book A Different Sort Of Normal Abigail Balfe describes music's capacity to light her nervous system up "like a Christmas tree" and that phrase describe its effects perfectly. When I listen to a piece of music I become totally absorbed in it. I absolutely love the immersive audio experience and I have a full 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos setup in my living room, which will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody who knows me. Having music around me when I'm on the go has been just as important for forty years: I bought my first Sony Walkman in 1984 (it still works!) and it was a revelation. Wearing headphones in public let me choose the soundtrack of daily life and the sensory isolation meant my stress levels plummeted. These days I have a grand collection of music players for a wide range of physical media as well as a ridiculous collection of wired headphones. My current mp3 player has a quarter of a terabyte of albums stored on its microSD card and if I could find one that had more storage available, I'd buy it without a moment's hesitation. As I type this, I've got a CD playing on the big system in the living room (it's Antipop by Primus, since you asked).

I write, play, and produce my own music, too. I've done so since the 70s, when all I had to work with was an acoustic guitar, a cassette recorder, and some pots and pans from the kitchen that could be used as a makeshift drum kit. As you can see from the photo at the top of this page, these days my approach to home recording is rather more sophisticated; I play lots of different musical instruments and—inevitably—computers are involved in the creative process as well. I've become good enough at the recording, mixing, and mastering process that people have started asking me to work on their music, too—and paying for me to do so. I really didn't see that coming. Me, a session bass player? Apparently so...

For the last fifteen years or so I've been a regular participant in the dual songwriting challenges of February Album Writing Month (where the target is to write 14 songs in 28 days), and its sister site 50/90 (where the target was to write 50 songs in the 90 days between July 4th and October 1st—unfortunately that challenge is currently on hiatus for the foreseeable future).

I think it's safe to say that I have become more than a little bit obsessed (there's that word again) with taking part. Doing so hasn't just had a huge effect on my skills as a songwriter and also as a musician, audio engineer, and producer. It has also helped me boost my musical output to around 100 new tracks each year and it's even helped me to develop a singing voice that I'm comfortable with inflicting on other people, something which I would have dismissed as being utterly ridiculous before FAWM. The idea of performing on camera would have seemed equally far-fetched but during the pandemic I would live stream from my bedroom studio on my Twitch channel once or twice a week. Having said that, the lack of any visible financial return after putting in hundreds and hundreds of man-hours of work made no economic sense whatsoever, so now I don't do that any more.

With taking part in FAWM and Fifty/Ninety I've become confident enough in my own abilities to have started offering my music to the general public, and much to my surprise, it's proved rather popular. If you fancy listening to what I do, the best place to start is my Bandcamp page. There, you can also get a copy of the eBook I wrote about getting very carried away in 2022 when I ended up writing not just fifty songs for Fifty/Ninety but 117 of them. The book (and the album of some of those songs that comes with it) is called A Grand Adventure.

The music I create has been shaped and moulded by the music that I've listened to for pretty much my whole life. On my Page o'musicians you can find out about the artists I love.

My fascination with the home audio experience has been inextricably linked with my love of films. I'm completely obsessed with the movies. I've loved films since I was little, but these days that love has become an all-consuming passion and if you still need any evidence that I'm Autistic, all you need to do is to take a look at my living room and the shelves of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs in there. Some friends of mine once suggested that I'd had the Internet Movie Database surgically implanted in my brain; my Autistic mind soaks up film trivia and end credits information like a sponge. My Autism also meant that, long before the pandemic struck, I preferred to watch films from the comfort of my sofa rather than sitting with other people in a noisy, overwhelming movie theatre. My home setup has been expanded and upgraded over the years to provide the best big-screen experience that I can afford. You can find out more—so much more—about all that on my films page.

Photography has been a big part of my life for sixty years. You'll find lots of stuff about that elsewhere.

I also enjoy birdwatching (identifying, classifying, and recording things? That's like catnip for Autistic people!) It's handy living where I do, because the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust headquarters and reserve at Slimbridge is a few minutes' drive from here. I joined the WWT in 1997, and I've been in the RSPB for nearly 50 years. My parents lived in north Norfolk, which is also prime birdwatching country. When I would go and stay with them, I would try whenever I could to go walking on the beach at Cley or Salthouse. There, you can see all sorts of birds—even the occasional Flamingo! After living inland for so long, I'm still terrible at identifying waders and the like, but I'm getting better. My mum was a great birdwatcher; she was the sort of person who could say, "what's wrong with that blackbird on the drive?" and when you looked, it would turn out not to be a blackbird at all, but a perfectly healthy ring ouzel.

Then there's reading: As I said earlier, I could read before I started school. Books have always been my most reliable means of switching off the outside world and pausing all the ruminating thoughts and destructive thinking. I love books with a passion. I'm a committed bibliomaniac and if you read Robin's book you'll find me in there when he visits the Cotswold Book Room. Look up the definition of the Japanese word tsundoku and the associated illustrations will look very much like my house. In normal circumstances, I can't go into a bookshop without buying a book, and my house is full of stacks of paperbacks and hardbacks. Even buying a Kindle a few years ago has done little to stop the growth of piles of physical books on all available flat surfaces in the house (apart from the ones already occupied by stacks of CDs, that is). Every year I buy a tremendous amount of books and I usually spend at least an hour a day reading through them. So many books, so little time...

On my books page I used to go on and on about my reading habit, then I switched to using Goodreads, but when it became clear just how vile and toxic Amazon is as an organization, I deleted my Goodreads account and all the reviews I'd written there, switched to buying books from the Cotswold Book Room, my local charity shops, from Hive, and from World Of Books and started writing reviews for my own website instead. You can find out what I thought about all the books which I read in 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 in the links.

Finally, as if you hadn't already realised, I spend more time than is good for me in front of my computer. It's a trait I share with a lot of other Autistic people. I first put together this website back in 1996 and maintaining the blog here has been a part of my routine since 2003. First and foremost, I use it as a diary, but it's also proved to be a useful repository for the piles of trivia and other Internet rubbish I accumulate every day (even if many of the links on earlier pages no longer lead anywhere). It's all archived here for you to browse through, should you wish to do so.

The discipline of coming up with something every week or so for more than two decades also led me to discover that I really enjoy writing as a pastime in its own right. I think I've become quite good at it. I've even written a few novels (as part of the sadly now defunct National Novel Writing Month event, commonly referred to as Nanowrimo) and usually I have a bunch of short stories in various stages of development. You never know; one day I might even start trying to get some of them published. If I do, you'll hear about it on the blog.

Chris