Chalk - since that's the way he usually introduces himself when given the chance to stop and think about it - is a tall, slim and painfully earnest young man who is at once so very, very English that even a Victorian would notice and at the very self-same time, so patently the result of a mixed parentage that it would take Francis Collins to puzzle him out - his complexion is pale enough to be verging upon the Northernmost European but his bone structure blurs the lines between North African and Asiatic and he dresses like a refugee from a living history tour of Edinburgh that recently found himself hitting up a string of fairly good tailors - the result of which has been to render him rather more conventionally attractive, if no less odd than he has been in the past.

 He's pleasant enough though, if perpetually seeming to be lost in strange worlds and vistas that only he can see - probably because he usually wears a pair of dark blue 'John Lennon' style round-framed sunglasses and can't see much else - not to mention his way of looking at people that suggests he knows just what they're thinking...
 ...and that they don't really have anything to be ashamed of.


 For those inclined to follow the minutiae of the Interwebs however, Chalk is someone else entirely, having - over the last couple of years - gone low-key viral as 'The Storyteller', a man who spends much time at the Colorado Mountain Zoo being covertly filmed telling stories with great patience and obvious delight in half a dozen languages to children and animals alike. Several collections of these tales - many illustrated by others who work at the zoo have seen modest success in children's publishing and it's something of a low-key running joke of the series that The Storyteller has no idea he's being filmed.