“Claire Jordan Homepage”, 2023-08-05 ():
[Claire Jordan autobiography]
Degree in biology and folklore; programmer, shop owner, secretary on newspaper. Worked at UK National Health Service (NHS) / Studied at University of Edinburgh / Lives in Slamannan: 2016–present.
I’ve set up a page from which to do Tarot readings. I’m going to try to raise enough money from Tarot to get driving lessons, as a driving licence would hugely improve my chances of finding a job, even at my age.
I’ve been many things in my time, including a programmer for the NHS, the Publicity Officer of the Raoul Wallenberg Committee in London, secretary to the Defence Desk at The Daily Telegraph, the owner and manager of a small Celtic/pagan witchy shop and a professional maker of wargame figures (although the firm I was working for, Jacobite Miniatures, went bust after I’d made them one figure).
I’m a practising witch and Tarot reader with a degree in Biological Science (the best clairvoyant I know has a PhD in cell-surface chemistry), and I seem to have become the go-to person on Quora for explaining evolution to Creationists. I’ve been active in British SF and fantasy fandom since 1981 and writing fanfiction (nowadays mainly Harry Potter-based, under the netnicks whitehound & Borolin) since about 1985. I’ve won a couple of quite prestigious awards for poetry and am currently working on a book about my father’s adoptive family—especially his mother, who started out as Ethel Maud Shirran, a shorthand typist in Edinburgh in 1922, and finished up as the Kazini Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa of Sikkim. You can read all about it, and my fanfiction, at
3ws dot whitehound dot co dot uk.Owing to the death in 2018 of my mother, whose carer I was, and the fact that I’ve been either a carer or a self-employed shop-owner since 2001, I’ve been left struggling to make money from freelance work, since I am so close to retirement age that it’s not worth anyone’s trouble to re-train me (not to mention spending most of 2019 with cataracts, and most of 2020 with Long COVID).
My long-term plan is to do a biology blog which with any luck will generate enough hits to enable me to sell advertising. I’m hoping to raise enough from the blog to buy a 3D scanner ($2,800—ouch) so I can get back to making wargame and dolls’ house figures.