500 Days
I went to Pakistan to deliver a training programme. Three days, two nights.
Then I discovered I could not leave.
How long can you keep telling young sons soon? For better and for worse takes on a special meaning with your wife.
For 525 days I lived inside a world of courts, officials, lawyers, money, influence and promises. I tried what I had spent a lifetime learning to rely upon. Law. Reason. Strategy. Connections. Persistence. Money.
One by one, they failed.
Eventually, I had run out of sea room.
What happened next changed the way I understood those 525 days — and much of the life that had led me there.
500 Days is the story of a man trying everything he knows to get free, and discovering that freedom may be something rather different from escape.
In preparation.
A Memoir of Captivity, Power and Grace
A Memoir of Captivity, Power and Grace
What My Father Gives
A Memoir of Father, Sons, Betrayal, Grace and the Sea
began with a simple thought.
What would I want to leave my sons if I could not be there at every age? What would I say to Sam at twelve, eighteen, twenty-five, thirty-five, fifty?
I had written once about leaving crumbs behind. Small pieces of truth, memory and love that might still be found later.
Years later, in Horta, looking at the sailors’ paintings on the harbour wall, I realised this blog had become one of those breadcrumbs.
So I started writing something for my son Sam.
It was meant to be a letter.
It got rather out of hand.
Letter to Sam became What My Father Gives. My father came into it. His father. Work. Money. Betrayal. God. Things I got right and quite a lot that I did not.
Then Beyond.
An old boat, my two boys, and an Atlantic Ocean.
Somewhere in all of that I began to understand that fathers give their sons rather more than they mean to.
The private family edition is complete. A shorter public edition is now being prepared.
And the best thing?
Sam, now twenty, read it in one sitting.
A Few Words After a Wedding
I came home from a wedding in Sweden with two Polaroids of Olivia and me, and a few thoughts about marriage, machines, choice and covenant.
Currently submitted for publication. A chapbook edition is planned.
