A man’s worth is measured by the worth of what he values.[1]
Lectori Salutem!
If you’re here, I gather you’re wondering who I am, and why I’m writing books—this is the 'About' page after all. So, since you’re asking, and we’re not limited here by the size of a dust-jacket back-flap, I’ll tell you both in relative detail, but not in that order.
Why I write
Like all kids, I enjoyed being read to, and as soon as I learned to read—properly—I was hooked on books, literally. I’m a book addict. It’s probably partly due to my deep love of language—I can read a dictionary for hours on end—but the real magic happens when an author takes you away into their world, lends you their eyes and shows you adventure, asks you questions that give you pause, and offers you a world—or the world—from new perspectives. And it doesn’t have to be fiction either. I can think of no better way to show someone else your mind, your innermost convictions, than through the written word, on pages of paper, bound into a book.
The spoken word is quickly forgotten, conversation—unless recorded—is more fleeting than a day-lily flower, and you can’t skip back and forth through a podcast or video-clip the way you can revisit a passage in a book.
Of course I don’t mean an E-Book or a PDF—although they have their place—but a proper book, with real pages that you can smell, and touch, with margins for notes and page-corners to fold—yes, I do—a book that you can take with you and read, consult, or leave on a shelf to go back to whenever the mood strikes you. That, my dear reader, that’s true treasure. Nobody gets themselves wound up about erased files or lost MP3 players, like readers do at a book-burning. Books have character, bound in vellum or velvet, cotton or cardboard, they hold promise or threat, power is on those pages, mystery and magic; how can a lover of language not yearn to wield a weapon, mightier than the sword, and write A Book?
I can’t think of anything so powerful, and yet, at times, so fragile, even impotent, as language.[2] My ideas, my plans, I can write down to perfection, I can word a patent application to describe this and only this, no more, no less. We currently have a choice of over 170,000 words in the English language, not counting nearly 50,000 obsolete ones. Still, when I try to tell you how I feel, I’m hampered by platitudes and idiom, worn out words and stale stereotypes, and therein lies the challenge, the motivation for my writing.
I write because I want to take you with me, to the heart of the matter, to touch you with the one thing that makes this life so damned beautiful, the only thing that makes it worth living, which is both the price and the reward.
I want to make you feel.
Who I am
I love language in every form, including programming languages. When my secondary education drew to a close, it turned out that I should have spent less time programming computers, and more studying. My poor decision making resulted in grades well below the entry requirements for my first choice of tertiary education—veterinary science. Maybe I should have gone into programming, but computing was young, the internet non-existent, and nobody I knew was thinking about coding, and I’m not sorry that I didn’t either. So, as I’d been working on cars since I was twelve, I pursued my second love, mechanical engineering, followed by aeronautical engineering.[3]
In between those two studies, Her Majesty requested some of my time, and kindly allowed me to spend my eighteen months of national service in the Royal Dutch Navy, maintaining the auxiliary engines on board the oiler Hr Ms Poolster A835. I applied for the Air-Force whilst still in the Navy, but a little over 2.5° of scoliosis—nothing, until you use an ejection seat and your spine buckles—kept me out of the F16.[4] After that, I moved to England, then Germany, worked in engineering and later as a blacksmith, shoeing horses. There’s no better way to combine a love for animals with an affinity for steel, but after five years of bending over and holding 1200 pounds of uncooperative equine by the toe, my back gave in—six foot four is too tall for a farrier—and we booked the Calais to Dover ferry.
During our absence, house prices had soared in the UK, so we bought a run-down pub in Wales. After running it for about four years, we understood that hill-farmers and their friends like a smoke with their pint, and chose not to take part in the government’s oppressive smoke-free pubs experiment.[5] We sold up and made the big move to Canada. The pub, which was not only profitable again, but had returned to being the lively hub of the village, a place where clubs and the village committee met, a centre for live music where birthdays were celebrated and wakes were held, where pensioners came for their bingo, where weekly pool and darts tournaments took place, is no more. It was turned into some apartments, a few years after the ban—the sad and very predictable outcome.
Now, my wife and I, with our two rescued Pitbulls, Bonnie and Clyde,[6] live off-grid in a small cabin in rural central Alberta. We enjoy a simple, quiet life. We travel some, and work when we need to, but mostly we enjoy each other’s company, surrounded by nature.