The author is a journalist and writer in the North-East of England. He wrote Cooking for Dads and published an updated version of TE Pritt's seminal 1885 work on North Country spider patterns, Yorkshire Trout Flies. Philip followed this with Year of the Spider, in which Pritt's flies were put to the test on the River Tees over the course of a trout season and The Damp Hackle, a collection of new writing accompanied by extracts from previous work.