I was born in long ago 1957 in the British countryside where I grew up running wild among the fields and hedgerows, earnestly discussing the meaning of life with the owls nesting in our back garden and grovelling entranced among the thistles and brambles on scratched knees, enthralled by the mystical world of the myriad of life forms that thrived there. They were my fairy tales and my soap operas. Urged on by my nature-loving mother and botanist father, I needed no other magic and that has remained so to this day.
At the ripe old age of 16, I learnt to type on my mother’s old Remington portable typewriter, convinced I was born to be a writer and a naturalist. Or a naturalist and a writer. But although I suppose I have in some ways touched on both of these, circumstances soon grabbed me by the hand (or was it the throat?) and shoved me unceremoniously down other roads. Since then I have earned my living in many ways, from waitress to journalist at the European Parliament, in the press and fund-raising offices of an internationally renowned archaeological project, as a hiking guide in France and Italy, as a teacher of English as a foreign language and as a translator, to name but a few. All these have both given me something and taken something away. What is left is who I am today.