BLOGGER AND NOVELIST

As a small child growing up in a British colony in Africa, I was often ill, and confined to my bed. Here, I developed a love of reading and a taste for literature which were to persist throughout my life. I learned to read early, devouring the delightful animal tales by the British early 20th century writer, Beatrix Potter (you will know them, I am sure: stories such as Squirrel Nutkins, Jemima Puddleduck, and The Tale of Tom Kitten), and the wonderful, gently humorous Winnie the Pooh stories written by the British interwar writer, A A Milne. I was soon to move on to Rudyard Kipling's Just so Stories, set in Africa, and his tale of the young boy, Kim, in 19th century British India. I became a precocious reader.

As I grew older, my health improved, and I grew to love the outdoors. I was to spend a great deal of my time in the African wilderness. (Decades later, I was to write about this). But my delight in reading has never left me. I yearned to write stories of my own, and while I have had many articles published over the years, I was to have to wait until I had retired, and was living in Scotland's West Highlands, before I began writing novels.

Since early 2022 I have had five novels published. The first two, Mallaig Road, and Hemispheres, are semi-autobiographical. I have recently had them withdrawn from publication, but you will still find copies online. The next three, however, are entirely works of fiction, and I am proud of them.

Of Sidearms and Dinner Jackets; Nineteen Seventy-Six; and Saint Blaise, are each located in Africa. The stories for the most part are set during the 1960s and 1970s: this period does not seem so long ago to me; I remember the sixties and seventies well. Although these stories are fictional, I draw upon my own experience of Africa during this period; I write about places I knew and loved. The theme throughout is one of societies in crisis, and of the challenges that extreme change poses the characters in the stories. The sixties, seventies - and into the nineties - were a period of often violent, inter-racial strife in southern Africa, and of profound political, social and cultural change.

Of Sidearms and Dinner Jackets is located in British East Africa during the final years of European rule. Nineteen Seventy-Six is set in Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula, during that year of riot and racial strife in South Africa. The story in the final novel, Saint Blaise, opens in the Cape Peninsula in the late nineteen-sixties, and follows the main character to Angola during South Africa's border wars, then to Rhodesia during the tail-end of her bloody bush war, and finally, to Guguletu, a sprawling black township outside Cape Town.

You can read more about these novels (and about myself) on my publisher's page online.

You can buy the novels directly from the publisher, or you can buy from Amazon or any number of online retailers around the world.

Writing these stories brought me a tremendous amount of pleasure. Although I undertook a fair amount of research for each story, so much in these novels is based simply on my own recollection of the periods in which they are set; of the regions in which the stories are located. They are authentic accounts of an Africa undergoing enormous and sometimes frightening change.