Hello.
Welcome to my blog. It’s a replacement for a website I built in 2004 when my memoir, Our Side of the House, was published.
I taught myself a little HTML, bought a web design program and, in a flush of enthusiasm for new technology, built the site myself. I thought it would help promote the book and give me somewhere to publish pieces for which I couldn’t find a home while doing my day job as an editor on the travel desk of The Daily Telegraph in London.
Fine idea. In practice, the site was of little help in selling the book (despite the reasonable reviews) and I didn’t have time to maintain it. Those people who found it, and were kind enough to email me, stopped coming back when I stopped freshening it up.
The blog, I hope, will be easier to keep up to date and will allow for more of a two-way conversation than the website.
Why Kerraway? Because I will be away from my desk in two senses of the word. I will still be escaping my editing job from time to time to write travel articles. But I will also be escaping from the pigeonholing in media organisations that deters a travel editor from holding forth on things he might be passionate about besides travel; things such as non-travel books, Spanish and the latest album by the likes of James Hunter.