Welcome to my website – home to all my published writing. Here’s a bit about me:
I’m a former speechwriter and diplomat. I grew up in East Anglia, studied languages at the University of Bath, and over a Foreign Office career spanning three decades lived and worked in London, Singapore, Madrid and Cairo.
Since leaving the Foreign Office in 2022, I have returned to my first love, writing, and devoted more time to my new-found passion, cycling. I often combine the two, by blogging about my cycle tours – you can read them by clicking on Blogs.
I’m currently on a personal mission to pedal through every European country from end to end. Since 2023, I have cycled the length of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Ireland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, mostly on my own. But the ride that started it all was the iconic Land’s End to John O’Groats, in 2021, when, for reasons that I struggled to articulate, to myself or others, I decided to cycle 1,200 miles from one end of the British mainland to the other, alone and unsupported. I was entirely unprepared for the challenges I would face, but the ride turned out to be exactly what I needed, both physically and mentally.
I learned so many important lessons along the way – about the value of a simple, defined mission, the kindness of strangers, and the need to eat more than a mini pack of chocolate buttons to get over Exmoor. But the most important lesson I learned was that if you step outside your comfort zone you can rediscover a version of yourself that may have become buried under the pressures of everyday life. A version of yourself that is younger, stronger, bolder; one you can be proud of and rely on. I also learned to see myself anew, through the eyes of people who knew nothing about me. It was almost a process of reinvention in reverse, starting with a stranger’s first impression. To put it another way, if people call you brave often enough, you start to believe it.
That’s why, when I wrote a book about my experience, I called it ‘Braver Than You Think, Cycling to Self-Discovery, from Land’s End to John O’Groats’. It was published on 17 September 2025. Click on Braver Than You Think for reviews and stockists.
Aside from this memoir, I also won The Daily Telegraph ‘Just Back’ travel writing competition in 2011, had a travel article published in MMM magazine in 2019, and in 2025 have received prizes for a number of my fiction short stories, with one of them published in an anthology called The Henshaw Six. You can read some of these pieces by clicking on the relevant tabs.
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