Welcome to my site. I am on my fifth life. I was born in Kitwe, Zambia, in February 1960 and educated at St. John’s Convent run by American nuns. I lived there until the end of 1968, then spent two years as a boarder at Marist Brothers College in Johannesburg while my parents decided on my family’s future in the face of the deteriorating Zambian political and economic situation. They chose to return to their native South Africa at the end of 1970.

I began my second life in Johannesburg. I was educated at King Edward VII School from 1971 to 1977. School was not especially pleasant. I was no academic. I engaged in several sports—cricket, rugby, hockey, tennis, swimming—but did not excel. I was known only as a singer-guitarist after winning the music talent competition in 1975.

From 1978 to 1985 I studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, graduating with degrees in Liberal Arts and Law. Two-year military service was still mandatory and I did mine between January 1986 and December 1987 as a military law officer at Air Force Base Waterkloof. After completing this service, I did my pupillage at the Johannesburg Bar and was admitted in 1989 to practice as an advocate of the Supreme Court.

I finished off my second life at the end of 1994 with one special arrow in my quiver: Shotokan karate. I took it up in January 1978 in the South African JKA Karate Association and discovered my real athletic talent. I was the protégé of Shotokan luminaries Stan Schmidt and Keith Geyer for 17 years, receiving the very best comprehensive training in Stan’s vaunted instructors’ class and Keith’s matchless Orange Grove dojo. They imbued me with a lifelong commitment to karate.

I began my third life in March 1995. Too free-spirited for the constraints of law practice, I decided to pack it in and go traveling. I had been abroad several times but just for a few weeks at a time. Now I would go for a year. I started off in Singapore, followed by Australia, then finally the USA, which I had visited twice before. I spent six months crisscrossing the country and training in various dojos affiliated to the Japan Karate Association’s American branch, the International Shotokan Karate Federation (ISKF) run by Teruyuki Okazaki. At the end of my U.S. travels, I was offered a karate teaching job in Chicago where the ISKF had floundered with instructors. It seemed like a good proposition and I accepted, but it lasted a year before the JKA expelled me in 1996. You can read about this saga in my book, PULLING NO PUNCHES—Karate Myths and Other Stories.

My expulsion was the favour of the millenium because I immediately joined Hitoshi Kasuya’s World Shotokan Karate-do Federation and discovered a kind of karate that I hadn’t seen before: innovative rotary and multi-directional movement unlike the boring, predictable linear stuff prevalent in the JKA and its spin-offs. I spent two decades with the brilliant Kasuya, becoming an expert in his brand of karate.

I began my fourth life in January 2009 within weeks of leaving Chicago for good. Serendipity intervened during a visit to Geneva, Switzerland, when I encountered highly placed people at the International Labour Organisation, one of whom offered me a short-term contract as her English-language editor once she discovered that I was a lawyer and could write well. I remained in Geneva until 2014, then moved across the border to neighbouring France working as an independent editor, writer and translator and traveling throughout Europe.

I’ve lived in four countries and traveled in twenty-two. I’m trilingual (English, Afrikaans, French—and busy studying Italian) and a self-taught three-instrument musician (vocals, guitar, piano). To escape the arrival of COVID-19 in Europe in early 2020, I returned to South Africa after 2.5 decades to begin my fifth life.