However, after a few years teaching English around the world, I learned that journalism – for small publications at least – was an achievable aim. I did a course, and fully expected to find myself working for Concrete Monthly, but somehow I ended up with a job writing for a sports magazine called BOARDS. It focused on windsurfing, and no one has ever heard of it, but it taught me to put words together in a vaguely interesting order. As an unexpected bonus, I also got to travel a lot, going to some very exotic beaches to test the kit needed to do the sport. For a decade I spent about three months of every year in either the Caribbean, Brazil, the Canary Islands, Greece or Egypt, with a few trips to Korea, the Philippines, Cape Verde and the Scottish Hebrides thrown in too. I’m sure all this travel has had an impact on the stories I now write. Here’s a shot of one of our photo-shoots in Tobago. We’re in a shallow lagoon about a mile out from the beach, and I was in the water taking the photograph of the photographer. I like it because I spent many a happy hour on top of that bamboo tower (we named it The Office)

 

By then I’d spent a lot of time testing windsurfing kit in an off-the-beaten-track windsurfing centre half way up the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. And just when I became unemployed (and already fairly unemployable), the centre itself came up for sale. It was still my secret dream to become an author, not to run a windsurfing centre in Egypt, but I still never believed I could be an author. So together with a much-more enterprising friend, we bought the centre, and tried to make a go of it.

The Sinai desert isn’t the easiest place to set up a business ordinarily, and we picked a bad time. There were the growing political upheavals that would lead to the Arab Spring, there were terrorist bombings that made western tourists wary about visiting such a remote area. And the hotel where we were based was old and decaying fast in the hot desert sun, and located far from the main tourist hotspot, all of which meant the few people we could persuade to come out there, often didn’t much fancy coming back. However, I had some magical experiences: sailing among huge shoals of flying fish, paddleboarding with the dolphins that regularly came into our bay, and my favourite of all, getting know a culture and a people so different from Europe. But we couldn’t get enough people through the doors to make it work, and a couple of years later I ended up back home, still unemployed and now with a sizable debt to add to my unemployable problem.

My partner Maria comes from Seville, in the south of Spain, and I think at this point she was eyeing up a likely return home without me. I wanted to avoid this, so I agreed to get serious about life at last.

The question was how? In the end I sat down and worked through all the possible professions I could do, starting from A and going towards Z. I still wonder why – given how ‘author’ starts with ‘A’ – I didn’t decide this was my moment to give writing novels a serious go – I had nothing else on. But I guess I still wasn’t ready. Instead I got all the way to ‘P’ before I panicked that the alphabet was about to run out, and proudly proclaimed that I would become a Planning Officer. I wasn’t quite sure what this was, but it had a nice ring to it. So before I could realise just how incredibly unsuited I was to such a role, I took myself back off to university to get on with it. A year later I graduated with a masters degree in Town and Country Planning, and an even bigger debt.

But that wasn’t meant to be either. The UK Government had just begun its austerity program, and no one was hiring planners. However, the council in Bournemouth decided it needed someone to run a special project dreaming up ideas to bring shoppers back into the ailing town centre. I had no retail experience, I hate shopping, and I didn’t have any ideas, but they thought I was exactly who they were looking for. Who was I to argue?

So for a couple of years I toiled away at the council, working hard but not really making a difference. And still sensing that something wasn’t quite right. And then something truly tragic happened. Every year Bournemouth hosts a very large air show. It needs loads of people to make it happen, and anyone working for the council is ordered to get involved. I was given the task of sitting by a gate that led to the rear entrance of the airfield, and opening it for the pilots when they arrived. There was a combination lock on the gate, and all the pilots knew the code already, because they came every year and it never changed. But the health and safety officer insisted that someone not-very-important had to sit there. Well, when it came to being not-very-important, I was at the top of the list. 

And as the pilots arrived (and opened the gate themselves) I couldn’t help noticing how they carried themselves. With the kind of loose ease that comes from doing something meaningful with their lives. I watched them stroll casually over to their aircraft. I saw them take off, and roar into the air and perform their incredible displays for hundreds of thousands of people. And I heard them interviewed over the loudspeaker system, about how they’d become pilots in the first place. How they were living the life they’d dreamed of.