My Story
Born and raised in a small English village, I contracted the travel bug early 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 background and accent, not to mention a complete lack of cricketing skills, led to a pretty strong sense of non-belonging. It’s one that has 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 leather biker jacket as I made an overnight conversion to become a punk rocker.
But my beautiful Mohican came a cropper just a couple of years later when I landed my first job with a Japanese investment bank in London. Once again though, I didn’t fit in and soon realised that capitalism just wasn’t 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. After that, I became a kind of freelance fixer, advising embassies and international organisations on how to do things better as I roamed across Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Finally 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 moved on to live in Kathmandu instead. I then rode my motorcycle to Burma, which was a bit of a disaster but made decent content for a book. After a few years living in Rangoon, I upped sticks again and moved to Bangkok. A bizarre interest in the yeti then led to a most unexpected BBC podcast series. Since then, I’ve been exploring Asia and the Americas and recently fulfilled a long-held dream to visit stunning Antarctica.
Along the way, I’ve met quite a few 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 really changed my life.
Finally, this "Particular Bear” thing - well the truth of it is that I’ve just always been a fan of the outlook of those 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, but instead wander curiously around their worlds, trying out new things and meeting new 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 - so particular bears indeed and wonderful role models!