Flogging books and driving trucks

Having finished university and gone back to Edinburgh, the big challenge was to raise enough cash to get to Shanghai – my target destination. Every job I’d ever done had only paid peanuts; washing dishes, selling books and working on …

Overcoming my fear of travel

Although I loved the city of Liverpool I found the university itself really boring. What helped me stick it out was mixing with ordinary people. In my first year I had hung out on a building site – there was …

Getting drunk and waking up in Bangkok

My brain stopped working. I couldn’t think, couldn’t come up with the right words and couldn’t stop the room swaying. I was pickling in a hot bath, trying to stay awake and vaguely aware of conflicting feelings: the opportunity of …

Fear of travel

We lived in a white house on the Firth of Forth, the estuary just north of Edinburgh. It was called Society House and there was a sign at the top of the road which read Private Road to Society. …

My new fairy tale

I’ve just published a new fairy tale and it’s called The Wind and the Castle. It was inspired by the strange fairy tales of Hermann Hesse. It’s my first eBook and putting it together was a scary adventure as an...