[...] I had always loved stories ever since I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’ at the age of six. I had my first flirtation with writing aged 18 when I wrote and directed a school play based on Euripides ‘Bacchae’ about the European incursion into Japan in the l9th Century. I never lost that desire to write, but for many years another love, travel, got in the way. I had my first taste while I was still at school, when, in one of the vacations, I drove with two friends through Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In the gap year before going on to University, I was employed as an instructor at the Hong Kong Outward Bound School. Then I worked my passage on a Norwegian merchant ship as a deckhand to Australia. I hitchhiked my way through the USA and South America. At Oxford I was taught by the poet and playwright, Francis Warner. One of the luminaries who came to talk to us at his seminars – as well as W H Auden, Stephen Spender, Iris Murdoch and others – was one of the greatest of our present day travel writers, Jan Morris. Listening to her, I thought I had discovered a vocation [...]