With a wry smile and a wicked glint in his eye, Roy Phillips describes himself as "a plumber of St Ives, poet, ornithologist, traveller, photographer, woodcarver, soldier, smallholder, fisherman and gardener", writes Frank Ruhrmund.
He adds that now and then, when he feels like it and when the muses are kind, he is also a writer. As it happens, the muses have been kind to him on a number of occasions.
They helped his first novel, the celebrated The Saffron Eaters, which fellow author John Fowles reckoned was "one of the finest contemporary novels to come out of Cornwall". The Saffron Eaters went on to win the TSB Peninsula Prize for the best West Country novel.
The first of a successful trilogy, it was followed by Horn Of Strangers and Apocalypse Now.
To these he added Cornwall Seasons, which won the 2003 Gorsedh Kernow Holyer an Gof award for the best Cornish publication in that year.
A Bard of Gorsedh Kernow, Roy – who writes under the name N R Phillips – has written extensively on Cornish wildlife. One of his pieces, a description of gannets diving in St Ives bay, won an Award for Nature Writing prize from BBC Wildlife magazine.
A self-taught wood carver, his studies of sea birds are so exceptional they suggest that if he were being presented in his latest publication, Rainbows In The Spray, as an artist rather than author, then the book could be regarded as a retrospective because the stories and poems it contains range from one written and read to St Ives Writers Group in the 1950s to Meeting Alberta, a story first written in 2003 but amended only last year, which concerns a tongue-in-cheek heroine of a novel which, as he says, "thankfully, I never wrote".
I've mentioned the glint in his eye which winks wickedly as Roy Phillips talks about his working life. It's the same glint which lights up several of his stories to such scintillating effect, in particular, his two stories about cats: Marmalade and Pussies Galore.
I confess to being a dog rather than a cat person, and to being a sour puss, one who rarely laughs at stories written to amuse, but these won me over on both counts.
Reminders of the days when the streets of St Ives were alive with cats, they are hilarious. It is not easy to write farce, but Roy Phillips makes it look simple.
Humour plays a major role in much of his work. He is after all, a Cornishman and employs a sparing use of the vernacular and touches of the Cornish language to portray the Cornish as they "belong to be". But he also comes up with stories that surprise with their seriousness.
Interspersed with a selection of charming love poems, among them the outrageous Dear Jenny and The Other Hunter Done, there is a great deal of love between these pages.