On The Road To Nowhere?

by William Monk

My father used to say that I had managed to fit three life times into one? Maybe that is true. This book is an account of those three lives, albeit only a small part. It is simply written as it happened. A journey of over sixty years, with thirty five years on the road. For the traveler today the world we all share is no longer the small place it once was. Anyone can now travel anywhere if you have the money or the time, either way it is mostly a relative easy affair. The real challenge that now exists it is find those places where few others have gone. Among the many happenings during my meanderings I have met a president’s wife, had tea with a Ugandan army general chief of staff, listened to stories from boy solders of Africa, shared tea and bread with the Taliban in Afghanistan, tea and biscuits with an odd chief of border control, suffered corrupt members of the church, and mingled with the famous at Glastonbury. Over the last forty-seven years apart from my nomadic life in England, other journeys have taken me to. Australia, Austria, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hungry, Italy, Iran, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Laos, Malaysia, Mozambique, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Philippines, Spain, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Turkey, Thailand, Uganda, and as it was then called Yugoslavia. While finding work as a shop assistant, aircraft machinist, agriculture contractor, forester, hedge layer, dry stonewaller, mechanic, restoring listed buildings, builder’s laborer, roofer, furniture reproduction, painter and decorator, teacher, gardener, landscaper, paramedic, medical trainer, logistics manager, bar manager, farm manager, and scuba diving instructor. Not so bad really, for someone whose secondary school headmaster after delivering several blows with his fist to the back my head stated to the whole class. “This boy is stupid, has an empty head as you can hear, and he will never succeed in anything, and will attain even less”.

649 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 6, 2017