Hi there! Welcome and thanks for visiting.
If you’ve stopped by to find out more about my book Going Solo: a Travel Memoir in Search of Meaning, Belonging and Identity – you’re in the right place. Here you’ll find extracts, a synopsis, the cover design, and an overall idea of why I wrote the book.
Find out more about the book by clicking Portfolio Writing on the home page. Under Project One you’ll see additional extracts from the book. It will be available in e-book, soft– and hardcover formats and next year as an audiobook.
If you here to find out more about me and other pursuits that help me interpret and make sense of life, you’ll find those by clicking About, Art, Photography and Blog.
As ‘a habitual solo traveller’, I leave home for three to six months a year to explore other landscapes and cultures. On last count, I’ve explored 37 countries (some multiple times), travelled to five of the world’s seven continents, hung my hat in over 200 places, and so far lived and worked as an expat on ten separate occasions in Asia, Europe and the USA.
Coming Soon
Going Solo: Reviews from experienced travellers & expatriates
“…provides both the inspiration and practical advice to simply take the leap and go.” P Carmody
“…engrossing and compelling while offering intriguing, thought-provoking insights…” G Phillips
“Most poignant was the author’s quest to understand herself, her origins and her place in the world…” J Scott
“…an excellent travel companion, especially for those new to solo travel, that led me to reflect on the web of contradictions that lie at the heart of any cultural engagement…” G Jones
“I found a soulmate in the author. Travelling for me is also a way to find my own meaning, belonging and identity. I felt myself walking beside her on the streets of London, Chicago and other cities.” K Ignasheva
Going Solo: Synopsis
An evocative armchair ride around the globe that inspires travel, especially for readers in transition, as a way of resetting life.
Insightful reflections on the immigrant experience, on history and on expat living combine to highlight how exposure to new places can sharpen our views on society, politics and spirituality and so help define our identity. By bringing questions of meaning and belonging into focus, journeys invite us to re-evaluate our inner landscape, entrenched beliefs and priorities. Every journey can play a pivotal role in the perpetual process of discovering and molding who we are and so lead us towards a truer version of ourselves. Unfamiliar environments tend also to heighten an awareness of how we’re influenced by history and how we fit into the global landscape. The process seems to hone and attract shared traits amongst travellers: openness to new ideas, curiosity, tolerance, and compassion. Reflecting on John – a fellow senior passenger who’s still going solo aged ninety – the memoir concludes that it’s never too late to start exploring and rewriting the story of who we are. The end echoes the beginning and a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘Those that arrive at the end of a journey are not those that began.’
‘Observed commonality sparks a conversation with James, my neighbour on this flight to Bangkok. Solo travellers, I’ve noticed, tend to latch on to the familiar, whatever form that familiarity takes because we tend to search for the icebreaker that will allow us to connect. James and I are soon slicing into each other’s history like surgeons under time pressure. We discover that we’d both lived and worked in Shanghai teaching English. The superficial observations about enjoying similar music and films opens the door to discover that we’d also built romantic relationships with mainland Chinese citizens – his resulting in marriage – which had both shattered for many reasons. Still, the main one by far was the enormous cultural divide. The overarching dominance of family and the norms of behaviour within an ideology of the collective rather than our Western focus on the individual eventually saw the relationships collapse like bridges over an increasingly turbulent river.
‘The day my mother-in-law moved in with us was the beginning of the end. She ruled the house. I became an outsider in my own home,’ says James. ‘Eventually, I left.’
The depth of our conversation is utterly inconsistent with our status as strangers. However, finding a human connection and exchanging existential insights can be valuable and enduring, no matter how incidental and brief that experience is while exploring the world, each other, and ourselves. These are the gems of solo travel. Such harmony with another on issues close to the soul is like a melody that reassures us that we’re not alone in this world and can find true commonality far from familiar surroundings. James giving voice to how cultural issues eroded his relationship helped me better understand the failure of mine – I’d walked out too. As my understanding grew, the grip the memory had on my heart released, and I began the process of forgiving myself – an epiphany inspired by a stranger who I’ll probably never meet again – a gift. Perhaps this is the reason some of us travel the world. We seek not merely to discover the new and different in the external world – but to uncover our essential selves as reflected in the differences and, better still, the similarities we share with people we meet. The announcement that we’re about to land shakes me out of my reverie. We disembark and say farewell.’