About me

Hi, this is just a page where you can find out a bit about me, who I am and what makes me tick. As my profile summary says, I am English, but I lived in South Africa for just short of twenty years, and since it was where I really grew into the person I am now, I think of it more as home than the UK. I loved South Africa. It combined everything that makes me happy: endless horizons, space, sunshine, hospitable people and a huge variety of cultures. I loved both the country life and the urban chaos and was very sad to leave it all in 2001

I now live in the Netherlands. I have a liveaboard historic Dutch barge (which you can see on the photo at the bottom of this page), and I have become fairly well adapted to life in Holland (see photo of my sometimes mode of transport as a passenger)

I spend a lot of time messing about on the water, but when I am taking life seriously, which is as rarely as possible, I teach English for both business and academic purposes.

 Life on the water isn't always romantic and glamorous. Correction. It is sometimes romantic but never glamorous, and it is very hard work. In Holland they have a saying koop een boot, werk je dood, meaning if you are daft enough to buy a boat you can expect to work yourself into the grave. 

I have written twelve books so far and am working on the thirteenth. One of my memoirs is called Watery Ways and its sequel is Harbour Ways. Both of these are about my first years of living on a barge in the Oude Haven in Rotterdam My very first book, African Ways, is a memoir about my life in South Africa, and focuses on the period when I lived on a farm in Kwazulu Natal. That was another very special time in my life and South Africa remains deep in my heart. There are two other memoirs in my Africa series: African Ways Again and Highveld Ways. My other waterways memoir is Walloon Ways about the three years I lived as a weekend Belgian, and the most recent of my books are two travelogues about cruising the French waterways. They are called Faring to France on a Shoe and Faring Forth Again on the Shoe.

As for fiction, I have written three novels. The first was The Skipper's Child, a book for all ages but branded as YA. It is an adventure story set on Europe's waterways in 1962 and it won the Silver award in the 2013 Wishing Shelf Awards. The second is called How to Breed Sheep, Geese and English Eccentrics and is set in Dorset, the UK in the late 1970's. It is a quirky novel about a girl and her rather special family who are trying their hands at self sufficiency as a means to holding on to a large and impractical country house. The cast of characters is undoubtedly eccentric and these include the animals too. It is heavily based on my real life experiences in smallholding and self-sufficiency, so you could say it is creative non-fiction or a roman à clef. 

I have recently finished and published a novel set in Africa, titled Beneath a Copper Sky, and I am now working on another 'Shoe' memoir as well as a sequel to The Skipper's Child. That's as of January 2023.

So that's about it about me. I hope you enjoy my blog, the extracts from my books and everything else my page has to offer. If you are ever in the Netherlands, look me up! I no longer live in Rotterdam, but you will always be welcome wherever I might be.