The dog

“I cannot live without the sparkling vintage,

Cannot bear the body’s burden without wine:

I am a slave to that last gasp when the wine-server says,

`Have another’, and I can’t.”

The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam

I was born in Birkenhead on the Mersey and grew up first in Manchester and then in Poole, Dorset. Over the last 25 years I have lived and worked in London, Nassau, Seoul, Accra, Mombasa, Saint Petersburg, Singapore, Sai Gon, Bangkok, Madrid, London and now Singapore. I have worked for Barclays International as an IT manager, for Unisys as a Practice Director, as CIO for MBNA España in Madrid, in the Ernst & Young’s Advisory business and now as Regional Services Director ASEAN for ACI Worldwide.

I enjoy living in different places and learning about different peoples and cultures. I have yet to find a place that I didn’t like - although Lagos comes close - and I have learned a tremendous amount from all the people I have met. Each culture has its own merits and I have been privileged to have been able to gain an insight into so many different ones.

I find it difficult to single out any one place as a favourite: life in the Bahamas is so laid back and the islands beautiful; the people in Ghana are friendly and welcoming, I visited more homes than in any other place that I have lived; Saint Petersburg has some great architecture and the politics as people came out of the Soviet era was fascinating; Singapore is a great place for an IT person as it is so forward looking and culturally diverse yet harmonious; Bangkok is exotic and the food is wonderful; Sai Gon is a vibrant and exotic city with tremendously resilient people who seem finally to be overcoming their 20th century history; Madrid stays open all night...

Of course, in many of these places there has also been much poverty and hardship and this has led us to support two charities that work to improve life for people in such countries - links opposite. I nearly died from malaria in Ghana, most Africans live with this threat every day of their lives. It’s difficult not to appreciate how blessed we are when South Vietnamese friends tell you of their time in a re-education camp or on a boat trying to escape after the Communist victory, or when you meet a survivor of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia.