About the Author

In this picture Charlie is seen sampling fermentation products during a break visiting Lower Saxony in March 2008 to take part in the CeBit Technology Fair.

Born and raised on a farm in Cubley in the 1980s, before BSE, foot and mouth disease and the Common Agricultural Policy - most of Charles' time was spent riding quad bikes far too quickly, building dangerously unstable dens from straw bales and 'helping' his father with the milking.

Exploitation followed early in the 1990s, when Charles found himself planting 15,000 strawberry plants on a cold, March morning at what is now Fairways Garden Centre in Ashbourne - the monotony of which was broken only by yells of "Stop planting them upside down!"

Education was provided by Brocksford Hall School in Doveridge, followed by Abbotsholme School in Rocester, where Charles' interest in IT began to develop when he and a friend hijacked the school network, turning it into a Linux cluster solely dedicated to searching for extraterrestrial communications for the SETI@Home project, resulting in several weeks' exile from the computer room.

For almost ten years from August 1995, Charles lived and worked with his father at The Red Lion Inn at Hognaston, developing a keen taste for Marston's Pedigree and a more capacious physique to accommodate the increase in consumption.