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During the closing months of World War 2, Julian Bonser’s father who was serving in the Signals Regiment managed to get a rare weekend pass to visit his wife in their small West London Flat. He winked at his wife and said, ‘Tonight’s the night’. And it was. And Julian Bonser arrived nine months later.
From an early age Julian enjoyed composing essays and penning letters. Aged eight he wrote a short poem in rhyming couplets and it won a minor prize in a literary competition – a whopping one guinea. With this he purchased a Bakelite recorder – a simple woodwind instrument – but being Bakelite it soon broke. And coincidentally a bourgeoning literary career ground to a halt.
Career-wise, Julian started off in Electronics Design and finished up in Project Management, taking time out in the 1970s to study full time for an Engineering degree.
Though his creative writing instincts still persisted in background, in the workplace, narrative output was limited by the need for objectivity and the use of either technical or managerial speak. Occasionally unbridled creativity reared its head, resulting in reports and documents getting sexed-up well beyond the functional needs of the subject matter. At the time it never occurred to the author that a frustrated writer lurked within.
For recreation Julian has usually turned to creative projects. Over a number of years he was engrossed in restoring vintage Thames motor launches with prize winning results. And later he got bitten by the juke box bug and totally rebuilt a number of machines dating from the 1940s through to the early 1960s. Similar projects have followed. Interests include badminton, skiing, motorcycling, travel, web design and running a recreational website.
On reaching the back end of an interesting and varied career, Julian arrived at the same crossroad encountered by many people whose working lives had sustained and stimulated them. In the author’s own words:
‘Having enjoyed a number of careers, acquired a variety of skills both from work and play, and soaked up a Heinz 57 of knowledge, experience and trivia, the question arose – what shall I do with it?
In an ideal world we should all aim for knowledge transfer when our brains have accumulated any useful learning. But it’s not always possible or practical. Too often a richly populated mind never gets tapped into. However there is a ripping good way of recycling a lifetime’s experiences, and that is to funnel them into books, be it fiction or fact.'
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