About Me

 Here is a summary of my background.

Basic stuff

My name is Dave Monk. I was born at the end of the second world war in 1945 and grew up in the Southend-on-Sea area in the UK, living in Belfairs, Westcliff and Eastwood, Leigh-on-sea.  I am married to Beverley (who I love dearly). We have two children, my son Richard and daughter Niki. When we were first married we lived in Rayleigh, Essex and now we live in Romford.

Employment

Most of my early working life I worked in Industrial Engineering in Management Services or Time and motion Study as it was called initially. However I was lucky enough to make a change into computing, starting with RPG/400 on an IBM 360, then moving to Personal Computers (PC's) with Visual Basic 2 through to VB6 and Visual Studio VB and C# .net . I worked as a programmer for a number of companies over the last 30 years or so, including Telephone Cables Ltd (Dagenham), London East Training Enterprise Council (Stratford)  and more recently Towergate Partnership (Romford), where I ran a small team of Application Developers, producing Insurance WebSites in the main. However, I retired from work in February 2012 and I now have the free time to do the things I like doing.

Computing

As a hobby I have written a number of applications during my time that are either marketable applications or toolsets designed to assist the developer. However since retiring in 2012 I haven't written any code at all.

Sports and Hobbies

I loved living near the sea and grew up with swimming, sailing and water skiing. My father had a small boat, a Dabchic called Seafire when I was about 11 year old in which I learned how to sail. 

Later he bought a 2.5 tonne sloop called Vesta. It had no engine and was a pig to handle as witnessed by my running it aground on the Maplin sands when I was about 17.  

I was also a part of a syndicate of three young lads who built and ran a small speedboat from Creeksea Ferry on Wallasea Island, which is when I learned to water ski.

Later in life I became interested in Archery, Classic cars and Motorbikes again. I have now taken up both indoor and Outdoor bowls and Ballroom and Latin dancing.

My latest hobby I have taken up is Air Rifle Shooting.

Motor Biking

As a teenager I bought a 1961 Triumph Tiger Cub 200cc motorcycle that I learned to ride on. In my later biking years I have owned a 1966 Triumph Tiger 90, followed by a 1980 Kawasaki Z650 C3 . After that I had a 1993 Yamaha Virago 535 and then my last  bike, a 2003 Honda Shadow ACE  VT750 CD Deluxe, in mint condition. However this was only for fun on sunny Sunday afternoons, which are not too frequent. Now I have decided to give up biking for good and all bikes and biking gear has been sold.

My Music

When I was about fourteen or fifteen, a friend of my brothers started to teach me to play a guitar. I learned on an acoustic guitar, strumming chords and singing. (very badly).  I learned to play rhythm guitar and we put together a little 3 piece, short lived group, that played a total of three gigs. Then we went our separate ways.

From that point I was hooked on playing guitar, but just for my own amusement. I have never played professionally and don't read music or use tabs. I simply play by ear.  I went through various phases. The Shadows, Bob Dillon, Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel etc.

Then in 2009 I discovered YouTube, and I haven't looked back since.  I started playing lead guitar using backing tracks and karaoke tracks and I love it.

In 2009 I became a "YouTuber", known as OldGuitarMonkey. I record myself playing the guitar and upload videos to YouTube. I have over one thousand videos currently uploaded. You may click the "My Music" link to view some of these videos or visit my YouTube Channel  to see all my uploads. It's interesting to see how the quality of the recordings has improved in such a short time since I first started.

I try to upload two videos each week on Monday and Thursday to YouTube. I play guitar for pleasure, so I don't strive for perfection in each tune. I get bored if a tune takes too long to learn as I am not a very patient person. lol

At the last count I have about 1300 Videos posted,  287,000,000 views and about 503,000 followers.