Five Fun Facts

My favourite destination so far is Zanzibar.

My best memory is riding a motorcycle through the streets of old town, zipping in and out of the dusty alley ways. My first boat trip was the crossing from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar. A long and choppy night that gave me a taste for sailing. Since then I have rounded the Cape of Good Hope, island hopped in the Adriatic Sea and sailed through the Mergui Archipelago off Myanmar.

I went to an all-girls school in Britain.

Our uniform was Black Watch tartan. Much like the Nights Watch the regiment was founded to guard the north from wild clans in the Scottish Highlands. Having worn bottle green every day for eight years, it’s the one shade of green I avoid.

I was born in northern California.

One of my earliest memories is furiously pledging every one of my chocolate Easter eggs and birthday presents for ten years to the first mermaid who would reveal herself to me. Despite casting these lavish promises into the ocean no mermaid ever appeared. It was the first time a beautiful woman broke my heart.

My desert island discs.

It would include Queen, Stevie Wonder, Astrud Gilberto and Polish Ambassador.

My desert island books would include Confederacy of Dunces, Wolf Hall, Wuthering Heights for fiction, Stalin by Stephen Kotkin and On War by Carl von Clausewitz for non-fiction.

I have engaged in international commerce!

While on a bus, backpacking around rural Malawi I purchased a chicken out of the bus window, carried it all the way to Lilongwe and sold it out of the window for a five-fold profit!