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 from public schoolboy to punk rocker. The beautiful Mohican came a cropper a couple of years later when I landed my first job with a Japanese investment bank in London. But I still didn’t quite fit in and I 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. After 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.
Finally attempting to settle down, I bought a house in Bali and turned it into a boutique hotel. But the restlessness was still there and I’d soon moved on to live in Kathmandu instead. I then rode my motorcycle from India 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 bizarre new interest in the yeti unexpectedly led to a BBC podcast series. I then fulfilled a long-held dream to drive through South America and visit Antarctica.
Along the way, I’ve met a lot of interesting people, picked up a couple of languages, and learned to play the guitar. I’ve also struggled with the meaning of it all and my sense of self, had a fair bit of therapy, and ultimately learned a couple of secrets that 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 given that it’s the philosophy Tai Chi is based on. So they’re neither conventional nor ostensibly sensible, but instead wander curiously around the world trying out new things and people while getting lost, confused and making lots of mistakes. Yet somehow things seem to always work out in the end!