Okay, I’ll gladly admit it. I never set out to be a travel writer. Unlike many members of the British Guild of Travel Writers, who evidently often started writing about far flung places even before they knew how to count, my own interest in travel writing came much later in life.

I was of course keen on travel and most certainly interested in words and language. But I never really made the connection between the two. I had jobs where I wrote a lot: policy papers and reports, really boring stuff. Nowadays I look back in horror at all those words penned to so little effect.

I have often been impressed by the power of landscape, and have lived and / or worked in areas full of evocative scenery: the hills of mid-Wales, the Irish coast, the dusty plains and badlands of southern Alberta, the edge of the Sahara, and wistfully beautifully areas of lakes and forest in central Europe.

Another key interest, going back for years, has been in cultural difference. I’ve often made long journeys to go to villages or parts of cities where folk speak a different language or profess a different religion from most people in their area. Minorities are tantalising. Perhaps it is only by understanding others that we begin to comprehend ourselves.

Nowadays I write about people, places and communities across Europe. And about landscapes that mark the soul. These may be remote mountain valleys, but they may equally be scarred industrial wastelands. There is beauty even in dereliction. And there is something fascinating about the mosaic of languages, cultures and beliefs that one encounters in travelling around Europe.

Landscape and people – both inspiring. And these are the two main themes that inform my daily work as a writer. Of course there are others. Slow travel is important. It is not just a question of taking the slow train rather than the sleek modern express. It is a state of mind. Taking time to savour the journey. From time to time I write about rail travel. Odd really, as I don’t know one end of a train from the other. But trains are seductive and I’m learning. Of course I write about boats and planes too.

You cannot wander through great tracts of Europe without running across politics. Europe is often a rather dark place. I’ve been to concentration camps and remote villages where terrible things happened. Like Lovas in eastern Croatia. So I sometimes write about communities that have been savaged by political or economic circumstance and I write too about individual and families for whom life hasn’t always been so rosy: migrants, refugees and the dispossessed. History has not always been kind to many parts of Europe. But it’s my world, and I still live in hope.

Hasta la victoria siempre!