Simon, tragically orphaned, was adopted by a pinball machine at an early age. Like so many evil geniuses before him, he turned this adversity to his advantage, soon earning a reputation amongst pinball wizards for his fine flipper action and his stubborn refusal to leave the machine even to eat.

On leaving home, Simon turned his attention to alternative sources of competitive sport, including golf, crosswords and Su Doku. He’s hopeless at real life.

Simon has been known to set crosswords, under the pseudonym of Pieman, and submit them to the Listener for test-solving. A month or two later, they get published in the Magpie.

Simon is responsible for test-solving puzzles once they’ve been accepted and typeset. If he has time…

With Mark he started the YouTube channel Cracking The Cryptic in the summer of 2017. It quickly became clear that a worldwide audience preferred watching sudoku solving to crosswords, and the number of subscribers has passed 450,000 as of April 2022. Producing a daily video each for the channel has become Simon’s main job.