I was born in Bristol in 1938, so – you’ve guessed it – this is far from being a recent photo. Old age has its rewards, but it doesn’t photograph well.

Nor is Somerset my real name. There couldn’t be two writers called John Harding, so I had to choose an alternative. To the west-countryman in me Somerset spells green hills, cider, good cheese and my uncle’s rambling old inn at the foot of the Mendips.

Life has been kind to me. I won a scholarship to a school my parents could never have afforded, read English at University College London, joined the BBC as a studio manager and started teaching myself Chinese. That was to become a lifetime task.

Then, by a happy accident, I learned that China – at that time a closed country – was recruiting foreign language teachers. By May 1965 I was living in the Peking Second Foreign Language Institute. Halfway through my two years there the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ pitched the country into a chaos that was to claim many lives, ruin countless others and cast a shadow over a decade. Being there at that time was an extraordinary experience.

Returning to London I rejoined the BBC, this time in its Far East Service. Eventually I was to be in charge of its broadcasts to Vietnam in the closing years of the war, and then of the Chinese Service. In 1985 I had a second chance to live and work in Beijing and to immerse myself in the literature of what was for China a period of unusual freedom of expression.

My other interest was classical music, my main instruments being piano and viola. I spent holidays in France with professional musician friends, walking in the hills by day and playing string quartets at night. One such holiday bred the idea that was eventually to result in the Pissevin novels.

By the time I took early retirement from the BBC I had learned to make and restore violins, and spent some years divided between that absorbing craft and playing chamber music.

One thing led to another and I became a one-man music publisher and founded Ourtext. That involved much drudgery, reconstructing thousands of semi-legible scores. After ten years I needed a shot in the arm, so for my own amusement I began writing fiction.

Today, eight books later, it’s time to publish and see what life is going to offer next.

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