Alison began working aged 15 as GA in a staff of three in a small hotel in Malham in the West Riding of Yorkshire, travelling to Manchester one day a week to study for her hotel management qualification.

Two years later she moved to Worcestershire and enrolled on the full-time MHCI course and spent the next twelve years working in hotels including The Lygon Arms in Broadway, Hunters Lodge in Broadway and The Raven Hotel in Droitwich Spa where she met her first husband.

Marriage and hotel management are unhappy bedfellows so she stepped sideways into Industrial Catering Management – which she loathed.

This experience and the relevant subjects of my qualification, Law, Accounts, Business Studies and Economics, gave her the opportunity to apply for a post as Personnel Officer at Uniroyal in Bromsgrove – when ‘Personnel’ meant looking after the workforce and not the Company. When this became HR and the focus changed, she became the Administrator for the Latex department - and later, a mother.

In 1979, recently divorced, Alison and her daughter moved to Gloucestershire where she had found a position as Girls’ Matron in a small Boarding pre-Prep., and here she met David. After they married, she brushed up her Accounting skills and spent the rest of her working life as a bookkeeper and payroll clerk, firstly for a small building company, and others on a self-employed basis, before joining a firm of Accountants, completing the client tax returns, installing Sage Accounts packages for their clients, operating the payrolls for sixteen clients and companies while being seconded to a golfing magnate three days a week to keep the books for his golfing outlets.

Retirement beckoned in 2007 and the following year Alison and David moved to Ashley to look after their two grandsons four days a week until they went to school and then the school run at both ends of the day, and in the holidays. Not exactly retirement but fun, hard work, fulfilling and she wouldn’t have missed it for the world. During this time Alison was a Trustee of Ashley Pavilion Trust for ten years, as Treasurer and Secretary and stand-in Chair when necessary. She had to move to Kirtling to escape.

Alison's interests and hobbies include music, singing with the Kitchen Choir, going to concerts, playing tennis, walking, gardening, cooking, reading, learning, history, art and architecture. She also enjoy writing – as is somewhat obvious!