Mike was born in Norris Green, a working class suburb of Liverpool, England, in 1942. After attending a Roman Catholic primary school and, for one year a local Roman Catholic Grammar School, he applied to enter St Joseph's College, Upholland, a seminary or training college near Wigan in Lancashire, North West England, a college preparing boys and young men for ordination to the priesthood. Mike was ordained priest in Liverpool in 1967. For the next twelve years, he lived and worked for the Archdiocese of Liverpool in Kirkby, a 1950s working class housing development of Liverpool, as an assistant priest and as chaplain in the town's comprehensive school for girls (aged 11-18). In 1978, he was sponsored by the Archdiocese of Liverpool and a charitable trust to follow a course in reading texts from the Bible, Marx and Freud - the course being set by the Mission de France, the French 'Worker Priest' movement, based at Fontenay-sous-Bois, Paris. The course led Mike to finalise a decision to resign from working directly for the Archdiocese of Liverpool - which he did in May 1979. He had been increasingly uncomfortable with what he saw as a clerical way of life at odds with the lives of many people with whom he had worked in Kirkby. He remains an ordained priest. He began working for the Merseyside Probation Service in May 1979. Some months later, Mike met Marie. They married in 1980 and have two children. In 1982, Mike qualified as a social worker after being awarded post-graduate diplomas in Social Administration and Applied Social Studies by the University of Liverpool. He returned to employment with the Mersyeside Probation Service. In 1990, he was appointed Senior Probation Officer and remained in social work management - moving into the Family Courts - until he retired from social work altogether in 2007. Mike had been awarded a Masters Degree in Criminal Justice Management in 1996 by the Liverpool John Moores Univesity. Anticipating retirement from social work, however, he successfully completed a research programme in theology and was awarded the degree of Master of Philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 2005. The thesis (available in the University Library) was entitled: The Roman Catholic Eucharist - Its Erotic Heart. Theology remains the central focus of Mike's intellectual life. In May 2007, Janus Publishing published a fictional re-working of his MPhil thesis under the title: Emily and the Mystagogue.