Neil was born in 1974 in Lancashire, England. He spent his formative years making comics with friends, which made up for not being funny by not making any sense.

Following the obligatory period of educational faffdom, he became a senior software developer with a global accountancy firm. This provided him with a good living and allowed him to be slightly pompous at dinner parties, all for the small price of a life of soul-wrenching torment. Fortunately, something really great happened to him - he developed testicular cancer.

He went on to make a full recovery, but the experience changed him irrevocably. He decided that life would be far more bearable if he spent more of it prancing about doing crazy foreign stuff and less of it in meetings discussing technical scope changes. He left the IT industry behind in a sorry pile of nuts and bolts, mourning the tragic loss of one of its least-arsed sons.

A year spent travelling between New York and Buenos Aires in 2003 cemented his desire to spend his life making a fool of himself in front of indigenous peoples, and coincidentally provided early writing material.

Neil stopped drinking alcohol in 2006 after a humorous incident with a pancreas and a suspected tumour. With him seemingly unable to have an epiphany without the help of illness, this was another piece of quite remarkable fortune. He now only lets alcohol pass his lips to either taste or to toast.

Predictably, he is now working on a series of projects exploring global alcohol culture, like the self-flagellating idiot he is. His ultimate aim is to stop talking about himself in the third person.