As a local Sussex author and artist, I have always loved the coastline and the South Downs. And there’s nothing more bracing than a sea dip to get the inspiration going. My artist wife Sue and I have lived in the County for over thirty years, first marrying in Eastbourne and working in Brighton, before settling west along the coast. I was however born in Guildford and attended primary and secondary schools where the family lived in Godalming – before starting work locally as an architect’s and surveyor’s assistant. My surveying work took me to Belfast during the times of ‘The Troubles’ in the mid 1970’s, and was my first experience of a community coming to terms with extreme hardship, but with dignity and unbelievable humour.  Then the travel bug really took over, and from 1977 I worked in the Middle East on surveying and engineering contracts in Libya, and airbase construction projects in the Sinai-Negev Desert – the subject of my latest book OVDA.

 In 1983 I went ‘back to school’ as a (very) mature student studying a full-time degree in Building Surveying at Thames Polytechnic (now University of Greenwich). I subsequently qualified as a Chartered Surveyor, specialising in the management of building insurance claims resulting from fires, storms, subsidence and various terrorist bombings in Central London. As Internet and home-working became prominent at the turn of the Millenium, Sue and I took the plunge and moved to the French Mediterranean coast near Spain. Taking my insurance files with me and working from our Narbonne home for almost a decade, I also managed to write and self-publish my first two books – before my contract ended and the final one beckoned back in the UK, until my retirement in 2016.

Internet working did however improve my typing speed, and so followed a further three self-published books as a result of mixing my interests of genealogy, history and travel – life in a nutshell, really. In 2020 I needed some light relief after publishing my Dad’s WW2 experiences ‘Battle Honours’; so I combined my writing with a splash of paint, to produce a humorously themed graphic novel Pablo and Jackson On Tour, first in eBook and paperback formats – and a calendar !  A recent re-release in hardback format has seen successful placements in local art gallery bookshops and high street retailers. 

I have just completed and self-published my fifth book, an uplifting travel memoir of my time working in the Holy Lands of Israel and Palestine – which has now sadly coincided with the tragedy of war.  Nevertheless, it has made my book ‘OVDA – An Airbase for Peace’ even more potentially prominent and an example of what can be achieved through peaceful dialogue after war, if the political will on all sides is strong enough – as was the case in my earlier lifetime.  

Sue and I always look forward to our next travel adventures, which doubles as ‘research’ if my accountant also reads this.  With my feet up in the sun, or at home, my next family memoir about my Mum, is becoming harder to resist and even harder to contemplate. My Mum would have said, ‘just get on with it’ – with a smile, a clenched fist, and a glint in her eye.  How can I resist?

Please travel to my website patriddybooks.com