About me

I’ve always had a fascination with writing and after leaving London to live and work in Chicago in 2003, I started blogging my experiences a few months later. Ultimately Chicago Addick was born out of my supporting Charlton Athletic from afar, this after being a regular attendee at home and away games for 28 years. But this blog is not just Charlton related and has become a doodle pad of my life, my travels, my dreams, my anguishes and whatever else the day brings.

Born and bred in South East London, my Dad took me to The Valley after the Dutch side in the 1974 World Cup opened my starry eyes to the beautiful game. Charlton wasn’t quite the same but stood amongst lots of big people on the vast Valley terraces I was instantly smitten, this despite us losing and Derek Hales getting sent off in my first game.

Charlton Athletic has remained a love-affair that has continued to outlive almost everything else in my life despite all their trials and tribulations.

I went to school in Catford (it was so good, it is now a petrol station), skipped college because I wanted to earn some money and frankly I wasn’t clever enough and started working in the city as a very wet-behind-the-ears 17-year old. I remember back then that the taste of beer made me shudder but I soon got used to it.

I left South East London at 30 and dabbled with the Kentish countryside. I also dabbled with marriage, both didn’t last too long although as a result I have a 23-year old son, who still lives in Kent and has also inherited, from where I don’t know, an Addick affliction.

I lived for 18 months in Hornchurch in Essex, and have a great group of friends there, but eventually overstayed my welcome at a best mate’s house and decided to grab an opportunity to work for my company in their head office in Chicago, a city I have since become the biggest advocate for. If you have never been, then you simply have not been to one of the best cities in the world.

I moved to Bermuda with the same company in July 2008. Bermuda is an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean about 640 miles from the nearest landmass in North Carolina. It is a nice blend of old England and new America and is strikingly beautiful but equally remarkably peculiar in many, many ways.

Along this expatriate journey I found someone beautiful to love me and my idiosyncracies and we managed to produce a daughter in October 2009, and as much as my son is quick-witted and smart, she is beautiful and cherished. Our busy liberated lives will never be the same again, just enriched…. and knackering.

I love to travel, and spend as much time as feasible back at home (London will always be home) seeing my son, family, mates and those ruddy Addicks. I am a whore for a new place and I have an aversion to going back to the same place twice, which by the way was an impossibility on a 20.6 sq. mile island.

I work in risk, trading it on to large corporations who should know better. It sounds boring but it isn’t always and work has allowed me to meet many fantastic people, given me plenty of great moments and a few quid to have some fun with. As I get older I get restless and tire of doing things that bore me and find more and more I start conversations with “when I retire….” not because I want to give up work, or get old but because I can’t wait to spend days doing exactly what I like.

Those things include cooking, film, music, sleeping, photography, collecting watches, being able to afford to collect nice watches, drinking good wine as well as travelling the world, and writing. I am convinced there is a book in me and also a painting. I don’t know where the painting idea came from, but if only I had more time I could go and buy myself some paints and a paint brush and find out.

Then in August of 2023 the time came to leave Bermuda.

Bermuda is a wonderful place to live and bring up a young family, even our daughter was born there, but for numerous reasons in no particular order – school, a new work challenge, and as a family we were ready for something different, we had made a long thought and drawn-out decision to move.

We bought a house in Sarasota on Florida’s Gulf Coast about 5 years ago, which we have gradually completely renovated, and it is to there where we will call home.

I hope you continue to pop by this blog and my postings encourage you to come back again. If you have just found me, then welcome.

You can also follow my regular 140-character ramblings on Twitter (X) or if you want to get in touch, then feel free to email me at chicagoaddick@gmail.com.