A Lark Ascending

Life is sweet. Everything is in its place. A young beautiful wife and twins, a boy and girl. Suddenly the girl is struck down with Leukaemia and the family move into a new dimension, another world. This is a story of love and hope, of the battle against the ultimate destiny of us all. It is told through the father and daughter but is about the whole family. They try to answer the eternal question, Why? And what is the purpose of life? It is a moving story that is representative of the stories of countless others.

How can you sing that love is sweet?

The post-war sober 1950’s turn in to the hedonistic 1960s. Social values change along with morals and culture. Establishment is challenged and young people worry about The Bomb. This is a story of the spiritual and emotional journey of two young people.Paul is a young man exploring his options in this changing world. He is floating in a stream wondering to which river of life it is a tributary. He joins in left wing political protest in a quest to belong to a movement. He immerses himself into going out with friends, drinking and meeting girls. His best friend is his anchor and sounding board. Their adventures sometimes turn to violence.

One girl attracts him but he does not know her. Their paths cross infrequently and without speaking they become more aware of each other’s presence. She is just a girl who he believes is probably unattainable. It was a time when young people went to church youth clubs. Paul drifts into a churchyard after an evening of drinking and feels a call to explore something that has stood there in the background all the time. He becomes involved with his local church and ends up with two worlds; that of his church friends and their conservatism and that of his drinking friends and their socialism.The girl has a boyfriend who is comfortable and safe. She isolates her love life so that she can focus on her studies. He wants more from her and they separate. She searches for another pillar and, like Paul, begins to explore her life options encouraged by a bohemian girl friend. She goes to France with her best friend and in the lake by the hotel she tries to save her friend from drowning.Paul eventually meets the girl and takes her out. They gently and slowly slip into love and marry. He has immersed himself in the activities of his church hoping this might satisfy his aspirations for the Truth, but feels swept by an unknown current and recalls his best friend telling him that he ‘is looking for a package tour to life’. The girl supports him but their relationship is strained as her previous boyfriend is still in her life and they part, only to reconcile when Paul finally settles his mind as to where he wants to go in a dramatic an encounter with his future in the middle of a blinding snowstorm on the moors when he comes face to face with God, the Truth and his own fallibility.Above all, this is a love story written in a reflective and descriptive style creating vivid images of life, experiences and the ambience in which the story takes place. The young man’s journey takes him toward God and faith when faith is not a fashionable subject. It explores his doubts and disbeliefs as well as his realisation that there is a spiritual side to life and that his faith is a conduit to understanding that. He comes to understand what is the truth, in his eyes, and he sees his future clearly before him with the girl. It is an exploration into those things that are beyond comprehension but which humankind desires to understand.

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Fat Cats on Thin Ice

Fat Cats on Thin Ice is a revelation and insight into the real world of lawyers, accountants and financiers. Greed and ambition drive the quest to maximise revenue at the expense of clients. Gerard is a high flyer. Young, qualified and partner in a top firm of accountants and insolvency practitioners. He just needs that one big job to really make a name for himself. He manipulates and manages the expectations of small business owners to generate fees. After all he is the biggest fee earner in the firm. He believes in himself but is unsure about his flirtatious wife Julie. Can he really trust her? And does he have a hidden past that is about to confront him?Victoria is worried about the future of her family firm. Her finance director makes a call to the company’s lawyer and triggers off a whole chain of events that change the prospects for the business and Gerard lands his big job.He meets an adversary who is trying to save the business whilst he tries to put it down. Who will win and what is Julie really up to when she is not with Gerard and with whom?



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The Green Monk & other eerie tales

These disturbing and eerie tales were put together as a result of a discovery of strange stories in a woodshed in Rutland, England. The author then put them together with other stories that had been handed down in the villages of the Pennine Hills of Lancashire plus some stories that had been collected from friends.

Pathetique

A story set in the Weimar Republic of Germany and the German revolution of 1919 when Germans fought Germans.

'An avenue leads to nowhere and comes from nowhere. It is not a thoroughfare and usually has no purpose as a means of traveling from one place to the next. It is a place where people live. We walk it and come to a place of no consequence, but we experience its ambience and enjoy the short journey. It is technically a street but more than a street. It aspires to greater things than a common thoroughfare. It is a place to dwell and linger. It is the avenue of a life without purpose'. 

Poetry

I wonder if you wonder

Poems by the Author from juvenilia to maturity.

I should have gone to Prague at twenty-three.

I should have made an effort to be free.

Of all those trappings of suburban life

That drew and beckoned me to take a wife

And sink in urban paradise

I saw my student friends go one by one

Until they all completely now were gone.

To chase ideals, I said I'd follow

But my words I knew rang hollow

And fell on saddened doubting eyes.

Instead, life took me in complacency

Through doors and corridors that were not me.

Those socialistic idealistic dreams

Were nothing but scholastic schemes

Of searching youth beguiled by lies. 

Or so I liked to say, explain away

Why I'd let life and wife take me away

For were those lies that filled my eyes

Or was it truth borne in disguise

Of words corrupted in the speech.

Although regrets I cannot hide

Eventually I found the truth beside

the River Rhine and by the DOM

left standing by the bomb 

I met a boy from Prague.

I asked him how and why, what he would be

"Why nothing else but to be free"

Is what he replied, but not to me.

He said it to my wife and she

replied "It’s you who are free, not we"

Business turnaround - how to do it. 

A guide for advisers and managers

The best selling manual on how to successfully turnaround a business.

A large corporate enterprise gets into trouble and it makes headline news. A thousand jobs might be at risk and it attracts the interest of the media until a major investor turns up to rescue it.

Yet every day across the world small businesses struggle to survive in changing markets and circumstances. They don’t make the headlines but their collective potential job losses are in the millions. Their need is as great as the larger corporate organisations, yet they don’t always get the support they need and many fail.

This fundamental guide to operational business turnaround is aimed at those who advise and work with the SMEs of the world, the key components to any country’s economy. It applies to all sectors and applies equally to not for profit organisations, charities and professional services.

Family Business Matters 

How to make your family business a success.

Running a business is not easy and for most people life is more comfortable as an employee rather than employer. At its worst managing a business can be likened to warfare; with the potential enemies being manifold in the form of competition, costs, market forces, adverse economic trends, access to resources etc. As if this isn't enough, if you are running a family business it can be almost like fighting a war on two fronts; there is the business and its issues on the one side and the family and their needs on the other and reconciliation of the two can often be challenging, and, in some cases, totally impossible. It's a matter of having to cope with two agendas. All businesses and organisations must cope with the mixture of personal and corporate needs and, in particular, the desires and objectives of the individuals managing the enterprise. With a family business the added challenge is that the personal side will include people who may not actually be employed in the business but who may be owners, family members dependent on the business for their income or family members who may simply influence the decision-making process through relationships with managers or owners.