Dizzy is also known as Phil Hendren. Phil has had other alter egos in the past online but settled upon Dizzy in 2006 when he decided to start yet another blog having been playing with his and others' websites for many years. Phil's earliest experiences online were with the occasional MuD and the joys of Mosaic although his first computer was a ZX Spectrum and then an Acorn. He also supports Everton FC.Phil has managed to be expelled from a state primary school (throwing a chair at a teacher) and state secondary school (broke someone's nose but Phil actually got hit a lot more), and was then effectively expelled from a state grammar school in the Sixth form because he couldn't be bothered to do the prerequisite three A-Levels (actually told his A-Level politics teacher to go away in Anglo-Saxon). He then sodded off to a further-education college and did a BTEC in Information Systems.
After spending time at college mooching around with computers, Phil finally went to University to do a computing degree. During his first year he found that getting drunk, stoned or "out of his box" was more enjoyable than the IT degree. He quit and decided to take a degree in Politics with a little bit of philosophy instead, which was more suited to the recreational pastime of getting wasted.
During his third year Phil decided that getting wasted probably wasn't the most productive use of his time and instead threw himself into a dissertation on New Labour and the "Third Way". In hindsight he wishes he had concentrated on, and been more critical of policy rather than the philosophical flaws in Anthony Gidden's alleged dialetic.
After completing the degree, Phil decided it would be a really good idea to go to the Open University and start a Masters in Social Science which he is still yet to finish because he found better things to spend his money on and got annoyed with the lefty nonsense in the subject.
Politically, Phil is on the Right and is considered a Tory (even though he's not a member). This means of course that apart from being evil, he is one of the few not the many, and is a supporter of privilege unlike the great and good socialists who never go to private school, nor live in great big houses in Islington and spend their entire working life doing politics rather than a real job. However, Phil has not always been on the Right. He started there but then veered scarily to the Left having consumed much of Karl Marx's work including the German Ideology, and found the apparently scientific descriptions of material history compelling.
Thankfully he was snapped out of it when he read Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge by Karl Popper. This epiphany was compounded with getting a mortgage and becoming a parent, thus sending him flying back to the sanity of the individualist Right. Having shunned student and party politics* at University because it was full of boring people who had no life, Phil finally decided to join the Tories in 2006 prior to Cameron taking the leadership.
He stood for Council in 2006 in Greenwich to make the numbers up in an unwinnable seat and managed to double the vote pushing the Tories from third into second. He says it was good fun because he wound the Labour Party up something chronic. He has not paid membership money to the Tories for some time though and does not intend too (not that it stops him receiving the occasional flier asking for £50,000 donations which he so obviously has).
In the real world of professional life, Phil is a system administrator looking after a large number of servers running either Solaris or Linux for a global computer game company. He's also been a Network Operations engineer playing around with Cisco 10000 series and horrible frame relay switches. Prior to getting a proper full-time job, Phil worked for Sainsbury as a shelf-stacker/warehouse monkey for seven years. He also spent a massive one day doing data entry at the Bank of India. He now lives with his Fiancé and two (naughty) beagles outside of London in the Shires which is a Labour-free zone.
Every now and again he appears on Sky News talking about random news stories of the day and attempting to make jokes about them. This can sometimes be very hard to do. He's also managed to write a couple of pieces for the Times comment section and has been a contributer to three books, The Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze, The Big Red Book of New Labour Sleaze, and Iain Dale's Guide to Political Blogging 2007.
* Phil did have a very brief spell as a member of the Lib Dems, but this was done purely because his dissertation supervisor was a member and he thought - in his then pot-riddled mind - that it might help him out in some way. Sadly it was not be and he got an Upper Second anyway.
Note: This post has been edited over time. The date stamp reflect its first creation date rather than its last update.
