I was born in Guildford in November 1951, and now spend my recent retirement with my wife Sue, between the West Sussex coast and Narbonne in south-west France – and any points in between. I attended primary and secondary schools where we lived in Godalming, before starting work as an architect's and surveyor's assistant, and as a day-release student at Guildford Technical College.
The travel bug then took over, and from 1977 I worked in the Middle East on surveying and engineering contracts in Libya, and Negev/Sinai airbase projects respectively. In 1983 I went ‘back to school’ studying a full-time degree in Building Surveying at Thames Polytechnic (now Greenwich University), and qualified as a Chartered Surveyor – specialising in the management and adjusting of building insurance claims resulting from fires, storms, subsidence and terrorist explosions.
As Internet and home-working became prominent, Sue and I were fortunate to live and work from our Narbonne home for almost a decade, until my contract ended and my final one beckoned, back in the UK. Internet working did however improve my typing speed, and so followed my first three books as a result of mixing my interests of genealogy, history and travel – life in a nutshell, really. In 2019, I combined my writing with a splash of paint, to produce my first graphic novel, Pablo and Jackson – On Tour. This year I have expanded the accessibility of my books with Print on Demand links to Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing. In ‘Future Projects’ I present a brief overview of starting my fifth book Ovda a light-hearted memoir of travel, work and comradeship in the Holy Lands of Israel and Palestine – before the hard borders.
Sue and I always look forward to our next travel adventure, which I try to convince myself is actually ‘research’.