I offer no guarantee that any of the following is true. Take with a large pinch of salt and make of it what you will.

Born in 1962, in the smallest county in England, almost within spitting-distance of the ancestral home of the pork pie

Age 1-7 - Raised in a draughty, unheated house on 180 acres of East Midlands clay

Age 8-13 - Exiled to boarding school in Northamptonshire (it being the 1970s, the oil-crisis had seemingly closed down the Tophet)

Age 13-18 - Relocated to similar in a town celebrated for its cement factory and the home county of a poet who couldn't even fel his own name.

1981-4 - The student. Off to the land of scrumpy on the hollow pretext of having an interest in Geography. More time spent getting hands-on with Devonian geomorphology than gracing the lecture-hall.

1984-94 - The outlaw years. Travelled a bit, drove a taxi, installed double-glazing, roved the countryside with a camera in one hand and climbing rope in the other. Attempted auto-didacticism but became preoccupied with Sigmund Freud and caught from him a nasty dose of SD (‘Shakespeare Doubt’). Wrote the great Freud novel. Had the great Freud novel rejected by some of the finest publishing houses in the realm.

1994-2005 - Family matters. Packed my bags and went off in a sulk to Constantinopolis. Taught English, fell in love, got married on the billows of the Bosphorus, went south and started a family beside the sunny Mediterranean sea. Discovered the key to Shakespeare's Sonnets - but nobody wanted to hear of it.

2005-22 - Money matters. Decamped to the emirate of Sharjah on the Arabian Gulf, where the streets are paved with gold (of sable hue), to seek my fortune and a cure. Tormented the local youth with English for Academic Purposes. Sadly unable to find the said streets (sense of geography none the best) nor any cure for the Morbus Shakespeareanus - which had by this stage progressed to a condition of general paralysis of the inane - a.k.a. chronic gaslitis.

2022-24 - Return to sunny Anatolia and the quiet life - aside from the delerium-inducing cacophony of the cicada-boys of summer. Dabbled my toes in the poisoned waters of YouTube, and wondered why I bothered. Knocked out a new version of the Sonnets book and managed to catch the eye of the world's most published writer on cryptography. When he forwarded my work to, 'Ten of the world's foremost experts on cryptology', they took him for a fool. He had made the beginner's mistake of reading my book, when they were prescient enough to dismiss it without opening the covers. Genius!

2024 - Return to the cold, dark, wet, broken country in which I was born. Revisited the Sonnets book, at the prompting of my ever-optimistic other-half. Finally, by the grace of God, I find one good man in the entire field of Cryptography and/or English Literature prepared to engage his brain with the Marlowe Codes. Thank you, Randall Nichols, for having the unique and freakish combination of subject-expertise and an open mind. History owes you a favour.

 

© Peter Bull 2004-2026
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