John was brought up in Lanarkshire, and moved to Inverness in 1992 when he and his Invernessian wife Lorna were married.  He worked in public and educational libraries. From 1992 until 1998 he was Educational Services Librarian with The Highland Council. John then became system manager for automated library systems, and ultimately, until his retirement in May 2017, was a member the High Life Highland ICT Team.

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John has always been interested in books and in writing, from the days when Enid Blyton, Anthony Buckeridge, Stephen Mogridge and Malcolm Saville conjured an engulfing world. For a time, he managed a Christian bookshop in Glasgow, and completed two research degrees in the 1980s exploring the profitability and motivation of 19th century Scottish religious and theological book publishers. John published The T. & T. Clark Story: a Victorian Publisher and the New Theology in 1992.

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Currently, he is the main writer on the Hilton Parish Church web site, and contributes the weekly Christian Viewpoint column to the Highland News.  A selection of these columns, Singing God’s Song was published by For the Right Reasons in 2011.

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One of John's  retirement projects is to finish a book, a memoir charting his  Christian faith journey from a fairly fundamentalist background to the broader, and more inclusive, place where he now find myself.

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A second retirement project is to research and write a ‘spiritual history’ of Inverness - not the same as a church history – if a suitable range of sources exist.

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John also volunteers  at Highland Foodbank - Lorna is the local co-ordinator. He is Communications Co-ordinator for HighlandLIT. He  loves working with the committee, and sharing in HighlandLIT events – meeting people, and encountering different ideas and perspectives help to shape his  journey.