I was born in Bedford in England on the 3rd of November 1951. Within a few years, I was living in Jamaica when my father was transferred to the island to oversee a building project in Kingston Town. The seed was sown from the day that I walked down the ship's gangway into Kingston Town and I have been travelling the world ever since.

When my family returned to England my father decided to take the family to live in his home town of Middlesbrough in the North East of England. We went from living like royalty on a sun-drenched island surrounded by happy smiling faces, palm trees, clear blue seas and golden beaches to living in impoverished conditions in a cold colourless northern town with a steelworks and two ICI chemical works polluting the air with noxious gasses. I was enrolled in school but I was hopeless in every subject except sport and geography and ten years later when I was fifteen years old I finally left school with the ambition to travel the world and seek my fortune. If you have read my biography “You Will Never Amount to Anything” you will know that as the title of the book suggests, I was told by one of my teachers that I would never amount to anything, that I would end up a drunk, unemployed or in prison. With those words ringing in my ears I was determined to prove that my teacher was wrong about me and I set out to make a success of my life and to travel the world. The problem was I had no education, no qualifications, and no money, and because of this I had to bend the rules a little to make something of my life, but since that day I have never looked back. I have worked as a chef on cruise ships and worked in five-star hotels and restaurants around the world, I have been to the Antarctic, lived in ten different countries including Jamaica, Bermuda, Australia, The Falkland Islands, Papua New Guinea, The Philippines and The USA. I started a real estate advertising business on the Gold Coast in Australia., and I was able to run that successfully while working at sea and earned a passive income which is always good. At one time I owned an outrigger sailing boat in Boracay in The Philippines, crewed by a great crew of Filipinos, taking tourists on day trips around the island and on sunset cruises. Despite what my teacher predicted, I never became a drunk or went to prison and I have worked continuously all of my life until the day that I retired.

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In 2017 when I finally retired after fifty years of working around the world, I moved to Phuket in Thailand to live. Six months later the wet season arrived, and unable to leave my home for days at a time I decided to write a book on what was quite often a traumatic experience when I was trying to make sense of the confusing and time-consuming retiring process that the Thai immigration love to inflict on farang retirees. I wrote the book with the idea of helping any future retirees who may want to retire to the "land of smiles" do so as easily and seamlessly as possible and hopefully help them to avoid the costly mistakes that I made when I came to Thailand to start my retirement. By the time the wet season was over I had written The Retire in Thailand Handbook (The First Six Months) and the book was quickly picked up for publication by Austin Macauley publishers. I now live on the beautiful island of Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand. When I am not writing or lying on a beach I spend much of my time travelling around Thailand or other South-East Asian countries doing research for my Retiree Travel Guide Series of books...Its a hard life but someone has to do it.