Midlife Crisis

After 20 plus years of marriage you would think that we would have settled into a nice rhythm of life and that big life changes were all past us now! But no. The ride of our lives was unfolding before our eyes, from sports cars and Harley Davidsons to strippers in New Orleans, from shady goings-on within the workplace to a homeless pregnant girl. How can a marriage survive such things? The affair with the Thai massage therapist was a catalyst. All these things changed the course of our lives. What would you have done?

Memory Stick

Crafty, cunning and certainly clever, Memory Stick is a firework display of different literary styles and genres. Crammed with detail and facts. Just like a memory stick.

Book club readers have described this first volume of Oliver Milner’s entertaining autobiography as “William Boyd and Bill Bryson meet James Herriot and Sue Townsend.”

Structurally Memory Stick is based around 134 footnotes, taken from opensource Wiki history references, between 1961 and 1987. The story starts in wet and windy North Yorkshire. Flies to Nigeria. Flies back again. Goes back to Nigeria. Flies back again. Neil Armstrong lands on the moon. Olly goes to Wales. Takes in Norwich, ends up in London. Tames a penguin, and then…?

Just download Memory Stick, it gets rather interesting.

Memoirs of a Failure

Tormented by an impoverished childhood, plagued by incessant bullying, and damaged by an abusive and violent relationship. Homelessness and broke, following failure after, failure, how does someone find the strength to keep coming back?

Memoir

This is a story of the casual criminality that is required to navigate the bureaucracy and business in general. Sometimes this is necessary for the system to operate, sometimes a mere convenience, sometimes for financial gain or even just a helping hand for another human being.The story covers the sloth, incompetence and pure evil of the Civil Service and their interaction with private business. It tells of what really happens in the inner workings of private businesses and their interaction with their overlords in intimate detail. This is a story seldom, if ever told, because those that know don’t write, and those who write don’t know. It covers the wonderful world of dodgy finance and operating a large business without capital. It is a story of human endurance and persistence and eventual victory of a sort.The story begins with a description of life in rural Queensland about thirty years after the original white settlement, covers the construction of major infrastructure when rural industries were expanding rapidly and the early years of the iconic mineral industry at Mount Isa. The author knew well at least eight men who spent a considerable stretch in jail and can say that none of them were bad men and at least three were men of higher moral standards and love of their fellow man than the general population. This is in contrast to some of the very senior public servants with whom he crossed swords, who were pure evil and grossly incompetent to boot.

Medicine in the Mountains

Against the background of broad brush strokes of Nepal’s history and geography, David Hawker tells a dramatic story. After 20 years working in Nepal, Nurse Ellen Findlay saw an opportunity to go and attempt to meet the desperate needs of people living in the remote and inaccessible mountains of Nepal. With vision, determination and bravery, she and surgeon Mike Smith pioneered outreach into some of Nepal’s most isolated and poverty-stricken communities. For 25 years, 7-10 day surgical, medical and dental camps were organised, treating more than 100,000 sick people during civil war and political upheaval, many in places with no roads or airstrips. Finally, after the massive earthquake of 2015, specialist gynaecological and ear centres were established to provide ongoing treatment and training for Nepali clinicians.

Me and My Shadow

Me and My Shadow – Memoirs of a Cancer Survivor is a brutally honest account of one teenager’s struggle to understand and deal with the most feared diagnosis known to society: cancer.

At 18 years of age, John Walker Pattison was thrust onto a roller coaster ride of emotional turbulence – his innocence cruelly stripped from him; his fate woven into the tapestry of life.

After years of failed chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments that ravaged his physical frame and almost destroyed his psychological stability – his parents were told that he would not survive. Yet, today, he is one of the longest surviving cancer patients in the UK.

Eight years after his unexpected recovery, the news that all parents fear, his daughter is diagnosed with terminal leukaemia. Yet like her father, she too would defy the odds and go on to become an international swimmer.

Pattison turned his life full circle and became a cancer nurse specialist at the same hospital that made his diagnosis decades earlier. He prescribes chemotherapy and cares for individuals with the same cancers experienced by both him and his daughter.

Throughout his journey, Pattison’s inspirations were the space rock legends, Hawkwind. He would get to play on stage with his heroes at the Donnington Festival in 2007.

More significantly, he found solace throughout his cancer journey in the history and spirituality of the Lakota Sioux Nation. In 2018, he would spend time on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation with the indigenous people of South Dakota. The same people who, unknowingly, supported him through life's greatest challenge: cancer.

Me

Ron Pearson was born in Bramley, Leeds on August 12, 1924. He began writing this book on August 12, 2021, his 97^th birthday. After a childhood beset by illness, he left school at 14, and took a job packing parcels in a multiple tailoring factory, not for him. He moved on to packing parcels general muggins at an advertising agency at 50 pence a week, which he loved. His career in advertising was interrupted by a four-and-a-half-year spell in the army on ‘Special Operations’. Returning to civvy street, his career culminated in being appointed Managing Director and then Chairman of one of Yorkshire’s most respected advertising agencies. He was a local actor for almost 50 years including the renowned Bradford Alhambra and Playhouse.

There are some sad moments outnumbered by many hilarious ones. Ron’s beloved wife, Pat, died in 2017 after 66 years of happy marriage.

The list of ‘celebrities’ he has met is impressive, including Princess Margaret, Prince Charles, Hollywood’s Marlene Dietrich, George Raft, Sir Ralph Richardson, George Best, Jackie Charlton, Harry Worth, Alan Bennett etc.

Marguerite Hepton Memorial Hospital

Based on the author’s own experiences, Marguerite Hepton Memorial Hospital is the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who left school and entered a world of learning and strict discipline, often headed by girls only months older than herself! There she was using equipment and procedures now long forgotten for diseases such as tuberculosis, osteomyelitis, polio and congenital conditions, all of which are now eradicated or treatable.

Her book will appeal to those connected with Thorpe Arch, the hospital, as well as a wider audience of anyone interested in real life nursing and how, off duty, these young people entertained themselves and their patients.

Good care, support, and camaraderie in the midst of changing attitudes, and fears of society towards illness at a time when the world was recovering from World War Two and trying to embrace new technological ideas or discovering new drugs such as antibiotics and streptomycin.

This book should appeal to many people whose lives have reached a reflective stage and anyone interested in history and nursing or educationalists looking for historical facts.

Margaret: Daughter of Destiny

“The damage done tonight will resound down the generations!”

These words, spoken in anger by an outraged mother in the year 1904, will prove prophetic. Fourteen years later, a child enters the world, innocent, yet blighted by the repercussions of a distant crime, committed on a summer night, in remote Western Australia. From the beginning, the odds are stacked against Margaret as she is robbed of her childhood.

In due course, Margaret reaches adulthood and to her horror, finds herself powerless to prevent the outcome she most dreads. The malevolent forces of destiny reach down to a further generation and into the lives of her children.

This story is a tribute to the courage and tenacity of a mother’s love. It plays out against the backdrop of a period spanning two world wars, a great depression and the dawn of a new millenium. Through all of this, Margaret faces the additional challenges of being a single mother in an unforgiving era.

The story follows the relentless power of generational forces, pitted against the strength of the human spirit. It relives one woman’s heroic struggle to change the future. Margaret forges a path – ultimately – to release and redemption.

Margaret’s story is told by the person who shared so closely in this journey of struggle and redemption: her daughter.

Lucky Dip

After an improbable beginning, Richard Thomas’s diplomatic career took him to some unlikely places, like Bhutan where his motor-scooter spawned an aid programme, or twenty thousand feet up in Robert Maxwell’s private jet buying up post-communist Bulgaria, or a NATO base in the North Atlantic to await the arrival of Satan, or to tea round the fire in Downing Street with a government minister and a mounted policeman, or to a wooden hut in West Africa where he, now persona non grata, and his Australian girlfriend, Catherine, managed to get married on the fringes of a dictator’s last-gasp political rally.

But it was not all beer and skittles. There were run-ins with secret policemen in communist Eastern Europe, encounters with horrific conditions in post-communist so-called orphanages where Catherine kick-started a new, humane approach to physical and cognitive disability in children and adults, deliberate cultivation of the dissidents who would supplant a communist dictatorship and a close-up view of Europe’s biggest displacement of people since the Second World War, the result of Bulgaria’s ethnic cleansing of a tenth of its own population in 1989 barely noticed by western governments or media.

All this, and much more, is recounted by someone who reckons that he struck lucky in the diplomatic dip.

Love or Money

Based on true events. Scott, a boy from a broken but good home suffers years of bullying from a very young age all before turning to fight back. And he quickly gets a taste for it as he realises he can fight back. He is more than capable of hurting people, which pretty much sets the tone for the future.

Along the way, he meets a series of crazy, messed-up characters from the Essex underworld, getting himself into deep muddy waters but finding a way through, a way to “stay afloat”. Pacman was a powerful, influential and charismatic Londoner who came to Essex and into his life with promises of being able to afford anything he would ever want or need. The same way he trapped a gang of about 14 people into believing he was their future!
Seeing hundreds of thousands of pounds pass hands every day, Scott was drawn into the dark world of gangs, robbery and hard drugs after finding a serious thirst for cash from a very young age. Would he ever escape this man and his gang without serious consequences?

The legend of “the Essex boys” is still going strong, well, this is one Essex boy that didn’t get caught and the gang… they were ten times more ruthless and twenty times more dangerous for sure! There were no rules, no loyalty and no morals! Love or money meant exactly that! Your money or everything you love… your call! On the brink of death, would Scott ever come back to the living? If so, how?

Love Is Blind: A Life with Horses

This is the journey of one woman’s life with horses. Catherine is a Romani woman, a Gypsy, and recognised her first horses around the age of two and now at seventy, she still has horses in her life. One of those horses is Samio, her big blind 18-hand Clydesdale. Catherine has, she thinks, just stopped rescuing horses; seven still share her life. Although she no longer rides, she still drives horses and her passion and love has never wavered. Having broken her neck and back in a horse accident at 16, she was told she would never ride again. It took her two years to walk and five years before she went back in the saddle but never again to ride wild or jump. Catherine lived on the road for the first 11 years of her life. There are some 25,000 Romani in Australia but to her knowledge, she is the only Gypsy who still travels in the bow top caravan, the vardo. No longer on the road full-time, she tries to travel when she can; always speaking for the animals of Earth. This is a book of love and passion for the horse, told by a storyteller who lives the story and walks her talk with laughter as she says, “Shit happens, just empty out your suitcases and plant flowers in the compost.” After a brain tumour and radiation, nothing seems to stop her and her love and activism for the animals of Earth – especially the horse and dog – shines bright and her enthusiasm for life and rescuing animals keeps her fit and healthy. Hers is a remarkable story.