User:Scott neil

Journalist, sportsman, born in 1966. For most of the first ten years of his life Scott Neil lived in Scotland before moving to the English midlands with his family in 1976. He attended Ibstock High School and Ashby-de-la-Zouch Grammar School in Leicestershire. In 1980, inspired by the exploits of Seb Coe and Steve Ovett at the Moscow Olympics he took up athletics and reached the final of the Leicestershire Schools County 1500m in 1983. After this he continued to compete as a road runner at all distances up to 20 miles. In 1986 he took part in a bath-tub race at Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French south coast as part of a team led by Jean Jacques Burnel of the pop/punk group The Stranglers. In 1988 he spent a year working and hitch-hiking around Australia, and became a cub reporter with the Coalville Times newspaper in Leicestershire in 1990. By 1993 he was a journalism student at Barnsley College in South Yorkshire and was one of 10 students picked to spend a semester at Los Angeles Pierce College. While in LA he shook hands with President Bill Clinton when the US leader gave an address to California State University, Northridge. Later the same year he worked in Moscow for the British marketing firm DMC. In 1996 he joined the Newquest group of newspapers in the south of England and has since worked for papers in Basingstoke, Winchester, Bournemouth and Bermuda. Scott has also done casual shifts on the national tabloid The Sun. His hobbies include guitar playing, writing fiction novels, stories and screenplays and attending concerts by the likes of Suzanne Vega, The Waterboys, Robyn Hitchcock, Oasis and The Stranglers.

Sounds like a very interesting life so far, Scott. It's great to have a journalist on board. --LMS