My Story

I was born and raised in a small English village, catching the travel bug vicariously from my parents’ tales of driving around Australia in a camper van (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, one that’s proved hard to shake ever since. 

At sixteen, I could legally make my own decisions about my education so I immediately quit the fancy school for a normal one. Cue another change of accent, sporting skills (football replacing cricket), and clothing (I opted to move straight from blazer & tie to punk).

My lovely Mohican came a cropper a couple of years later when I finished school and signed up with a Japanese investment bank in London. But I still didn’t quite fit in and realised that capitalism wasn’t really for me, so I quit to go and live on a communal farm, or kibbutz, in Israel instead.

Over the next couple of decades, I taught English in the Sudan, interned at the British Embassy in Madrid, helped people to grow better rice in Madagascar, worked as an EU bureaucrat in Brussels, went to study martial arts in Hong Kong, and got posted as a diplomat to India. I then became a kind of freelance fixer, travelling around the world 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 Nepal. l then rode my motorcycle to Myanmar, which was a bit of a disaster but made for a just-about-decent book, subsequently staying on there for a few years. Just before the world closed down for Covid, I moved to Thailand. 

Along the way, I became a meditation teacher and a Tai Chi instructor,  got a degree in International Relations and an MBA, and learned to play the guitar. I also went in for a bit of therapy and started looking for yetis (no connection, I think). As for the "Particular Bear” thing - it’s in fact nothing at all to do with abominable snowmen. I’ve just always been a fan of the attitude and 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). They’re neither conventional nor ostensibly sensible, wandering curiously around the world trying things out and making mistakes, but it all always somehow works out well in the end - so particular bears indeed.