About me
This is me. My name is Mark. I was born in north Nottinghamshire just over 30 years ago, grew up in a small coal-mining community surrounded by fields and forest, and I currently live in south east London with my wife Jess, and my cat Hello. To be honest, we’re completely pig-sick of living in London and are hoping to escape to Kent as soon as possible in 2007. Watch this space.
I am now a self-employed photographer having just bailed out of a 10 year career as a graphic designer.
Why SparkyCentral?
The name Mark is quite dull. It was in the top three most popular boys names for ages in the 70s and 80s, which meant it became annoyingly common. It’s also prone to adaptation. I remember one of my Uncle’s calling me Marcus when I was very young and my father encouraging me to hit him and tell him that wasn’t my name.
Fast forward to the 90’s and ‘Marky Mark’, which I found particularly annoying, especially as it associated me with Mark Wahlberg’s early career as a crap, white-boy rapper who liked to flash his pants. Having relinquished violence aged four, my defence was to ask politely for people to call me Mark. This proved impossible for some people, so when ‘Sparky’ came around I gave up.
Jump again to January 1998 when I started my first proper job at a company called Deepend. Of course, thanks to the common-as-muck nature of the name Mark, there was already a Mark working there so the email address mark@deepend.co.uk was spoken for. I was to be mark2@deepend until my good friend Jay stepped in and pointed out that I had been previously known as Sparky. This went down well, and has stuck ever since. Some people from this time don’t even realise my name is Mark. I had no choice but to embrace it and so was created SparkyCentral.
What’s the point?
Since I first built a website here 9 years ago it has traditionally been a repository and showcase for my design work, partly because everyone else had one, but also for the purposes of changing jobs. As my time as a designer came to a close I found myself not as concerned with advertising my abilities on this site and needed something else to go here.
Having been a latecomer to blogs and previously never that desperate to share my life with the outside world, I have now jumped fully on to the bandwagon. I don’t have anything of consequence to say, my written English is not astounding and my life is not particularly interesting, but what the hell. I enjoy the outlet, and it encourages me to take time out of my day and collect my thoughts, which has to be a good thing.
