My Story
Raised in a small English village, I contracted the travel bug vicariously from my parents’ tales of driving around Australia in a camper van in the 1960s (they were original Ten Pound Poms). At age eleven, I was shipped off to a posh British boarding school on a Government scholarship for non-posh people. Having the wrong accent, clothes, cricketing skills and just about everything else led to a pretty strong sense of non-belonging. It’s one that’s proved hard to shake ever since.
At sixteen, finally allowed to make my own decisions, I quit the fancy school for a normal one, exchanged cricket for football, and swapped the blazer and tie for a biker jacket as I made an overnight conversion to become a punk rocker. The beautiful Mohican came a cropper a couple of years later however when I landed my first job, with a Japanese investment bank in London. But I still didn’t fit in at all and realised that capitalism wasn’t really for me. So I quit and went to live on a communal farm in the Middle East instead.
Over the next couple of decades, I taught English in the Sudan, interned at the British Embassy in Madrid, helped people grow better rice in Madagascar, worked as an EU bureaucrat in Brussels, studied martial arts in Hong Kong, and then got a posting with a diplomatic mission in India. Following all that, I became a kind of freelance fixer, roaming across Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific advising embassies and international organisations on how to do things better.
Attempting to finally settle down, I bought a house in Bali and turned it into a boutique hotel. But the itchy feet were still there, so I soon moved on to live in Kathmandu instead. I then rode my motorcycle to Burma, which was a bit of a disaster but made decent material for a book. After a few years living in Rangoon, I upped sticks again and moved to Bangkok. A frankly bizarre interest in the yeti then led to a very unexpected BBC podcast series. Most recently, I’ve fulfilled a long-held dream to visit Antarctica, probably as remote as I’m going to get!
Along the way, I’ve met a lot of interesting people, picked up a couple of languages, and learned to sing and play the guitar. I’ve also struggled with the meaning of it all and my sense of self, had a bit of therapy, and learned a couple of amazing practices that have really changed my life.
Finally, this "Particular Bear” thing - I’ve just always been a fan of the outlook of two famous bears, Paddington and Winnie the Pooh (there’s even a theory that Pooh is actually a Taoist, which would be right up my street). They’re neither conventional nor ostensibly sensible, instead wandering curiously around the place trying out new things and people while getting lost, confused and making lots of mistakes along the way. Yet somehow things always seem to work out for them in the end!