I was born in Scotland and had no sooner formed a basic vocabulary in the Glaswegian vernacular, than I was whisked southwards across the border into the English Lake District, and I had to convert my limited, four-year-old’s speech vocabulary into Cumbrian Norsk. ‘Ars garn yam, marra’ (I’m going home, mate) sufficed as a childhood parting for the next six years until home shifted again. My next southerly migration took a lot longer, three days longer to be exact, and was mostly spent in one of three aircraft types, each unpromisingly, equipped with propellers and floral curtains.

The passage from London to Brussels, Basel, Idris (Lybia), Kano (Nigeria), Brazzaville and on to Johannesburg was interesting enough, as we flew low enough to make out villages and towns, and geography stuff in some detail. The only irksome feature of the journey was my hand luggage, why, as a ten-year-old, I ended up carrying a fishing rod all the way to the distant side of Africa is lost in the mists of time (I wasn’t even that keen on fishing). It was never again to be employed to catch fish, but, in my prepubescent years, I did shoot down a lot of imaginary meschersmitts with it.

Arrival in South Africa did not end the sojourn, and for the next twenty-odd years I wandered in and out of many neighbouring countries, getting as far north as Zambia and also included a number of backpacking expeditions to Europe. Returning permanently to the UK in the mid-eighties, I lived in London, the Midlands, Hertfordshire and finally North Yorkshire, where I am now settled with my wife and two children.

A career in ICT allowed me to experience working life in various business organisations, including a stock exchange, a supermarket chain, a fashion house and clothing retailer, a NHS Hospital Trust, local government, a building society, a credit referencing agency and various communications companies.

After having a number of articles published in my high school magazine, I decided to write a collection of humorous short stories – it has taken me a while to get around to it!

Gordon Lewsley

Tales of Earthly Humour and Beyond
In this multifarious collection of chuckle-charged short stories, the reader will be entertained by two interleaving genres. The first of these contain amusing stories of everyday life, which will whisk the reader from the Alps to the African veldt, meeting medieval bell-makers, political commissars, mountain bandits, con-artists, gold prospectors and many other characters along the way. Their pursuit of Earthly activities, including the discovery of ancient archaeology, the curing of mysterious illnesses, facing the consequences of epoch-making inventions and plain old claim-hopping skulduggery, to name a few, are teased out and woven together by the second genre; a series of chronicles of extraterrestrial origin.

In these leapfrogging episodes, the tribulations of a band of alien immigrants to Earth, thrown together on the public transport system, are recounted and where they share recent experiences – invariably entailing the comical consequences of cross-cultural confusion.

This literary potpourri is guaranteed to raise a smile if not an infrequent out and out belly laugh.