I am a Research Fellow at Oxford University, and run a research project based at the Faculty of Music, the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (I am also a Director) I have also been involved with the The Online Chopin Variorum Edition and Chopin's First Editions Online and was the imaging consultant on the pilot project to digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls. I’m currently one of the two investigators on the Tudor Partbooks Project in partnership with a colleague at Newcastle University

I have three degrees in historical musicology (Bachelor, Master and Doctoral) from Edinburgh and Oxford, and if you're really interested you can read my doctoral thesis here: www.ramesescats.co.uk/thesis/

Some people have actually read it!

I am a full GCCF judge of the Tonkinese and Suffolk breeds.

Fortunately I work at home most of the time, and can be flexible enough to cancel things if I have to care for a sick cat or kittens who need me. I work at the computer all day, so the computer for me is work, not play: this means that I avoid the horrible machine as much as possible when I'm not working. All the housework, gardening, shopping, and other usual business of running a house (paying bills, organising mortgage, getting car serviced etc.) has to be done by me. I'm also involved in things that take me out of the house like choirs, judging at cat shows, hobbies and other activities, and it has been years since I had time to sit down in front of the television, though I like to read in bed if I can stay awake long enough.

Any spare moment is spent enjoying my cats, and making sure my kittens are well loved and properly handled so that they're friendly and well-adjusted. I hope you'll understand that this leaves very little time for updating my website or downloading pictures from a camera and emailing them out to enthusiastic new owners. I do what I can with my website, but ultimately it's the real world where I (and the cats) live, and that's where my attention is concentrated. I make use of WhatsApp on the smartphone to keep people up to date with kitten progress.

When I have time I sing with and conduct choirs around Oxford; I am organist of my parish church; I used to design wooden animals for a toymaker in Cinderford (though I haven't done this for a while!); I (rarely) make special silk clothes/wedding dresses for friends; I write spoof plays which are performed by groups of friends (in costume of course!); I enjoy drawing in graphite and have an RHS Gold Medal for botanical drawing in colour (links are to my albums); I have an n-gauge model train collection; I am a publisher of fine medieval manuscript facsimiles, doing all the typesetting and design as well as publishing; I take absolutely no exercise, and I am fascinated with and besotted by my cats.

I'm very lucky: I have a good life, a comfortable house (if a little messy) an excellent vet, and the love of my very special feline and human friends.