I’ve been here for a few months now but in that time I’ve been a bit preoccupied with getting the Winter Outdoor 100 put together and published – so apologies for the silence. The product guide is now live, please do go and check it out. We had an excellent team behind it, including our photographer Chris Johnson who took some brilliant pictures of the kit out in the Brecon Beacons.

Anyway, I know that there are plenty of people who’ve been following Outdoors Magic for a number of years now, some for perhaps over a decade, and there might be a few who are stumbling across it for the first time as well, so I thought it would be polite to introduce myself.

I’m fortunate enough to be one of those people who has a career based around my hobby, you could even say that I’m a hiker first, journalist second.

That was the order in which it all happened anyway. After leaving university I didn’t have a clue what type of career I wanted so I just wandered away from making a decision. Quite literally. I walked out of my front door on the South Wales coast and completed a 1000-mile loop around the edge of my home country, wild camping each night and stopping in just about every pub I came across. I quickly got hooked on the sense of adventure that a long distance walk provides, so, inevitably after that I kept going: hiking the length of the Dolomites on the Alta Via 2 and from one end of Spain to the other on the Camino de Santiago.

I did a bit of blogging as I went, and I also sent shot-in-the-dark emails to hiking magazines asking for commissions or work experience.

That led me to The Great Outdoors magazine where I spent three years working on the editorial team. During that time, I went on countless wild camps, crossed Scotland on foot, and had adventures further afield, with a few visits to Scandinavia and the Alps.