This article featured in The Times in November 2019.

In August 2018, I left the Army and set off from home with a second-hand bike. I wrote this on my blog: "I head alone to the continent excited and nervous. In reality, I don’t know what to fully expect.…

Simone de Beauvoir "To exist is to dare to throw oneself into the world" That little bit of trepidation before embarking on an adventure is something we’ve all experienced before. There’s the anxiety of what could go wrong. The fear…

Robert Burns "Wherever I wander,  wherever I rove, The hills of the Highlands forever I love" Much of my childhood was spent traipsing the Scottish hills. It is a place that has always compelled me to explore its wild beauty…

Writing In Search of Sisu was a wonderful and cathartic experience. Going through the editing phase, or at least Stages 2-3 (see this post on How to Edit a Book), was also really informative and a pleasure to share the…

Writing a book is a journey. For me, it was an intense and emotional one that forced me to delve into my past and forced me to reflect. In Search of Sisu was the result of this and it is…

I wasn't a massive bookworm when I was a child; I was distracted playing sport, exploring outside and climbing trees. It took a many years of persuasion for me to finally yield. A string of obsessive reading urges followed in…

You’ve got an idea and decided to write a book. Step one on the literary journey is complete but there’s a whole minefield ahead. Beyond the obvious question of how to actually write the thing (this was my approach if…

Aristotle "There is only one way to avoid criticism: Do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing."  I am by no means an expert on this. I have run a successful campaign for one book but did try and learn quite…

So that’s one (fairly massive) thing crossed off my to-do list. My crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter ended today with 220 backers and £7,878 pledged which dwarfed my target of £5,000. I genuinely cried on the first day of the campaign…