CHARLIE CONNELLY – A PROFILE
June 15th, 2005 by yoko
Charlie Connelly was born in west London in the late summer of 1970. This juxtaposition of decades has left its mark, however, as Charlie manages to combine the laid back disorganization of the era of free love with the sartorial cluelessness of the following decade.
Within eighteen months the infant Charlie had, with the use of flipcharts and government statistics, persuaded his parents to move south of the river and he grew up in that exclusive part of London that doesn’t have the tube. Sent to a school that produced Olympic athletes and inexplicably regarded the best route to personal fulfilment to lie in rugby union, Charlie naturally turned out to be a runner so slow that he was once lapped by the following year’s sports day, and a Charlton Athletic supporter.
Having got through most of the eighties reasonably unscathed, an unfortunate and decade- late brush with punk notwithstanding, he left school and went to the University of Essex. Colchester, he had learned, is Britain’s oldest recorded town and Charlie wanted to hear the recording.
In 1993 Charlie left university and stumbled into a job putting on music tours and festivals, and from there he attempted various careers from musician to laboratory technician to mortuary assistant to artist manager to tee-shirt packer to sound engineer with varying degrees of fiscal catastrophe.
It was when he found himself living in Penge (where locals are to this day trying to hook the full moon out of the pond with a hoe) and working as marketing manager for the Complete Works of Lenin that Charlie finally returned his hand to writing.
His first book was published in 1998 and he hasn’t looked back since. Which is a pity because about a year ago he dropped his wallet.
On the publication of his first book, Charlie became a full-time writer specialising in travel and sport. His literary travels have taken him to places as diverse as Liechtenstein, Arctic Norway, the wilds of rural Bosnia, the Principality of Sealand and Stevenage Borough Football Club.
Charlie’s sixth book, Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast, was first published in the summer of 2004, was serialised on Radio 4 and in the Daily Telegraph and led to his giving a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society and a sell-out show at the Edinburgh Festival.
He recently forsook the tropical and sainted south London for the frozen tundra north of the river, where he spends his time moaning about north London drivers, going on about how much nicer people are in south London and living with his partner Donna. Future plans include retiring to a house with a grass roof in the Faroe Islands and settling on a hairstyle he’s reasonably happy with.
