My working life has embraced five major careers: –as an Environmental Health Officer in local government: –as a lecturer in Public Health in Lusaka, Zambia: – as Chief Delegate with the International Red Cross in East Africa: – as Hygiene Adviser with British Airways: – as an independent consultant in Food Safety in the airline and hospitality sectors globally.
My company was based in Oxfordshire, with a subsidiary in Nairobi and partnerships in Heidelberg and Singapore. Clients included SIA, Malaysian, Emirates, Cathay Pacific, Air Zimbabwe and the Holiday Inn (Middle East) Group. Tragically, all that came to an end with the collapse of airline travel, and hence investment, following 9/11. Whilst living in South Wales, I served on the Board of the Monmouthshire Housing Association and was a director of their subsidiary property company, Capsel Ltd. In these roles, I learned a great deal about social housing and its administration. I also volunteered in the British Heart Foundation shops in Chepstow and Caldicot, giving me a great deal of satisfaction, making new friends and accumulating lots of material for one of my projects. I sang bottom bass with the Caldicot Male Voice Choir and took a number of singing roles in the Caldicot Musical Theatre Society . I have written four books on Food Safety and edited two professional journals.
In my fiction, I have tried to draw on my experiences around the world over a period of just over fifty years.
I am now writing two novels, working on an idea for a TV sitcom, developing a multi-faceted family history and penning my own personal life story.
Two of my novels have now been accepted for publication as paperbacks and Kindle books on Amazon, and one of their conditions is that the books must not be published elsewhere, so I am taking them off WordPress.
ORSON AND MAISIE A novel for tweenagers (and adults with a silly brain) about new creatures accidentally created in the home of a geek, from sourdough and a BlueTooth chip. Now there’s wild imagination for you!
BAG IT, TAG IT OR RAG IT A number of years ago, I used to help out as a volunteer in a local charity shop and that’s where most of the ideas in this set of ramblings came from I originally envisaged it as a TV sitcom, maybe evolving into something of romcom, depending on whether Lucy has time in her life for romance, and how she finds it.
In all my life I have only ever loathed, really loathed, one person and I worked through a lot of my hatred, anger, humiliation and depression by imagining the worst possible way for him to die. This was the result, a short story which might one day, morph into a longer one. Again, it depends on where Cobra, Teflon, Raj and the other characters take me and whether they really want more of their exploits put down on paper or to continue to work in the shadows.
John Barrow's Fiction 