About
My early years were spent between the bush and the beach in Whale Beach (the pic of headlands and Pacific was taken from my childhood home), north of Sydney, before my family moved to a distinctly greyer London. However three long sea-journeys between the two hemispheres rapidly formed my appetite for the colours, intensity and humanity of the tropics. Add to that a well-travelled extended family, and the die was cast.
After completing a degree in French at Sussex University, I spent two years in northern Italy learning Italian, being initiated into the pleasures of excellent food and wine, and having an inevitable brush with art history.
A highlight of that time was an epic overland journey by VW van through Greece, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan (the pic shows me inspecting Mt. Ararat). Bandits, sublime landscapes, heaps of grilled lamb and total ingenuousness typified this odyssey, shared with unconventional Italian friends. The experience helped shape my deep interest in the Islamic world which continues today from Palestine to the Maghreb..
The next chapter was a Parisian foray that lasted 18 years, interrupted by a period in Monte Carlo working for a dodgy art collector and exploring casinos. In Paris, jobs in fashion and the art world segued into journalism for US and UK publications covering Parisian arts and lifestyle. This also saw my first book, the Paris Art Guide, a reflection of the booming Mitterrand years of the 1980s when arts subsidies flowed and artists hardly lived in garrets. Cigarettes were of course part of le look though I quit long ago.
A commission for a cultural guide-book on Paris led to other travel guides on trickier destinations: Mexico, Costa Rica, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Vietnam (see Books). Each year the publisher would offer me a plate of cakes... i.e. a choice of countries to research and write about. Joy! I reveled in those solo expeditions for most of the 1990s - with no internet, it was a different era. ...
Parallel to this I wrote on contemporary architecture and interiors, working with the brilliant photographer, Christoph Kicherer, who died far too young. Our features on homes in Sri Lanka, Singapore, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia were widely published. Later, in 2002, I wrote a design book, In the Asian Style, focusing on South-East Asian houses, with photographer Kim Sayer.
A return to London serendipitously coincided with the rise of Cool Britannia but that didn’t stop my travel-lust. Embryonic ‘adventure’ travel of the late 1990s found me hitching rides on outriggers down the Madagascan coast, exploring war-ravaged Mozambique, visiting Bajau sea-gypsies in the South China Sea (the pic shows me with a seaweed-farming family) and catching the last plane out of Guatemala before Hurricane Mitch struck. All was photographed and written about in travel-guides now long out of print.
Soon after, my National Geographic guidebooks on Spain and Portugal led to a role as regular guest lecturer for their Iberian Expeditions notably by luxury train across northern Spain. Researching the guide-book also inspired my first travel-cookbook, New Tapas. Besides the Iberian peninsula, I have written extensively on both Morocco and the Middle East (where I have regularly volunteered). Yet I still thirst for new destinations, the latest being vibrant Ghana.
After witnessing huge changes in Spain over 40 years or so and writing many related books and features, I hand my travel crown to Andalucía because, uniquely, it fuses the Arab world with Europe – injected with a huge dose of alegría. There, in my holiday house amid the olive-groves, I contemplate the sierra, cook local produce and plot sorties to tapas bars and fiestas. Finally, after all those years, I created a book about the region: Andaluz, a Food Journey through Southern Spain.
