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"Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards"    Søren Kierkegaard

This (old) page has links to all the various sections.
I have divided the site, arbitrarily, into sections coinciding with discrete periods in my life, rather than equal periods of time.  The sitemap is now a better way to navigate…
Think of this page as a sort of trunk in the attic - full of old conceits, slightly embarrassing - but also illuminating, in a faintly amusing way, an earlier frame of mind: same ol' life, but from a shorter perspective than now granted me. Knowledge is the residue of thinking, and wisdom is not the accumulation of knowledge.
A sort of online diary, divided into sections as I've moved around the world…

Australia In the 'Early Years' (1963 ~ 1973) I attempt to recall the time I spent after school in the Liverpool Pilot Service followed by an uncertain period in London and the southeast, culminating in a European trip by VW camper, ending in 1974 London just after the first world gas crisis.
Australia beckoned…
Australia Next (1974 ~ 1976) is a seminal three years in Australia, criss-crossing the continent with abandon in a VW bug & an old Australian Post Office VW Type 2, converted (the hard way: by hand…) into a camper.
A trip to Papua New Guinea preceded an ill-timed homeward journey overland from Singapore to Calcutta, where the monsoon forced us to fly back to the UK into the oh-so-hot summer of 1976.
There then followed a sort of hiatus (1976 ~ 1982) where I kicked over some traces (some kicked back…).
Selling Papuan artefacts in Islington antiques market somehow morphed into a coffee importing business by way of exporting VHS videos to Oceania.  Obviously this madness had to end and, eventually, I packed up to fly to the USA.
(1982 ~ 1991)  We booked on one of Sir Freddy Laker's last flights (though no-one then knew it) to the USA for ten unforgettable years in California.
I ended up living on a fishing boat based in Long Beach harbor before sailing the Caribbean from Grand Cayman to St Maartin via Jamaica during Hurricane Hugo.
"You have ten fingers - stick 'em in ten pies!"
'The Traveller's Tree' (1988 ~ 1996)  These pages cover a few months on a 48ft ketch in the Caribbean (1988's Hurricane Gilbert?  Montego Bay: we survived), and several separate short trips to Australia, Tahiti, South Africa, Côte d'Ivoire & Ghana, & finally eastern North America, out of my then newly established base in Northwest England.
(1991 ~ 2004)  in 1991 I arrived back in the UK after nine years in the United States.  Plans to import rugs from Swaziland came & went as I lived through the Chinese curse of 'interesting times'.
In 2001 I started freelancing around the north of England & was revelling in the freedom it gave me to travel through landscapes I love whilst getting paid to do so…
(2005 ~ 2011)  I encourage friends to climb some hills with me, starting in the Yorkshire Dales.  Festivals (Glastonbury, Womad, Edinburgh) feature, as does a first eye-opening trip to Nigeria.
I turn 60, get a bus pass & buy a motorcycle (again…), & a friend buys an old bay window VW campervan to do the festivals in style.  Onward to the past!
(2011 ~ present)  In 2011 I start driver/guiding small groups, mainly Aussies & Kiwis, around Northern England & Scotland.  I fall in love with Skye and, basically, most of Scotland north of the Trossachs.
More trips to western Canada & Australia with - for the first time - Bali.
"A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist."


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