This is not a bio. It is more of an impressionist self-portrait of the many things I have seen and done in 47 years. Sure it is a "boast list" but I want you to know how rich, wonderful and diverse my life has been.

Born and bred in rugged, resourceful New Zealand. Grew up in small cities (we moved around quite a bit) but spent time with my parents in the mountains from before I could walk. Skiing when I was 7 but loathed it.
Walked alone to school from age 5. Ran around the neighbourhood until dark. Little 7-year-old boys on expeditions to capture tadpoles, walking unsupervised down the highway, across the river, over farmland, slithering around muddy pond banks, home after dark.
Later, cycled to school: riding over black ice, chill-blains on our legs, the freezing wind in our helmet-less hair, passing cars and buses down a dizzing hill road, broken bones and worse (but I escaped unscathed despite several spills - have never broken or sprained anything).
Stayed on my uncle's farm often: climbing haystacks and trees, driving trucks, riding on tractors, eeling in the irrigation canals.
In the Boy Scouts back when Scouts really did stuff: climbing Mount Allen without adult supervision, lighting fires with kero, swimming in deep dark river pools. Rose to Patrol Leader. Thrown out for whacking an obnoxious little brat: I have never suffered fools gladly.
Wonderful summers in the Southern Alps at my parent's hut: me and my sisters free to roam the valley, damming streams, "glissading" down steep shingle slopes, wandering in pristine beech forest, watching deer and possums and keas (mountain parrots), climbing the skifield to the top of Mount Hamilton for panoramic views of the Alps.
Adventures with my best friend: staying at his family house at the beach, hunting rabbits (I was best shot in the platoon - see below - but I never hit a rabbit or any other animal), kayaking river estuaries, long cycle expedition on remote gravel roads. Later stealing his mother's car for wild joyrides that should have killed us.
Military training in school. Rose to equivalent of a RSM. Annual training with the real soldiers in the army camp: swimming the big NZ rivers with boots and a pack; hunting each other at night on a remote river plain; "strafed" by helicopters in the day; sleeping out in deep frost, sleeping bags crackling; brutal pranks in the barracks; open brick toilets and showers; firing 303s and Brenns and occasionaly Armalites - dreaming of the anti-tank rockets.
Got my driver's licence on my 15th birthday (that's NZ law: appalling). Somehow didn't kill myself or anybody else but learned how to handle a heavy three-on-the-tree manual station wagon in a Swedish turn, and double de-clutch while hurtling downhill.
Adolescence was an emotional nightmare, with a remote father and few other male influences (you should read Stephen Biddulph's books on what is wrong with the way we raise boys). Thoughts of death, plunging self-esteem. Smoking at 12, a pipe at 15, joints at 20. Lost my virginity at thirteen to a mad girlfriend with even loonier parents. She drove me to the brink of madness (and over). We were engaged at 17 while still in school. Ended at 19 when I found out she was sleeping with our friend and flatmate. Closest I've come to suicide.
Found God at 13 and kicked him out at 18. In the interim I was the priest's sacristan (no abuse though I reckon he might have been fighting that demon), and ran three youth groups. One day I looked at the people in the church and realised the whole thing was crap.
Left home at 18 to go to engineering school in another city...

This is turning into a bio! Back to a pastiche:
Since then at various times in my life I have:

• worked on 8-story building site, in a steel foundry, laminating plywood, assessing tax returns, bar manager, wine steward, sole-charge cocktail barman, doing government electrical research, painting a three-story building, chopping firewood, picking asparagus and potatoes, in a factory making stoves, in a garage making bongs...
• spent 20 years in three countries in the software sales business: presales, support, internal professional development, managed a team of 12 in five cities, spoke at conferences around the world, lived on airplanes
• met and presented to CEOs, boards and executives of major corporations
• I've quit, been fired, and resigned all from the same job (a notorious bar in Christchurch)
• stayed on a hippie commune
• hallucinated for 14 hours on mescaline
• assaulted a flatmate (spent the rent on green Chatreuse for the third week running)
• fought with off-duty cops in an Atlanta bar to save a black man from a beating (one of my proudest moments)
• seen people die in a car crash and a rolled bus
• seen and heard gunfire in four contries
• listened to: James Morrison blow cool jazz 6 feet in front of me in Whispering Sands resort while I sipped Benedictine; George Thoroughgood and the Destroyers in the Christchurch Town Hall and then at my place afterwards (my flatmates were groupies); Neil Young in Athletic Park 1984 with both my sisters (one is no longer alive); David Bowie in Christchurch's QE2 Stadium (rated by him as his best concert ever) and again in Wellington with Vee while sipping Heineken in the corporate box; the Pretenders, Simple Minds and Talking Heads all on the same bill, also at QE2; Billy Joel with a dozen other people in a smokey bar in Richmond Melbourne one Sunday afternoon while Christie fed the baby up the back; the Pirates of Penzance in the Melbourne Concert Hall with my Dad (he knew every word); Stevie Wonder at Kooyong; the world bagpipe championships in Dunedin; Linda and Vika Bull doing cabaret in a 1930s spiegel-tent
• hitch-hiked in NZ several times, right around Tasmania, and up the east coast of Australia
• travelled in: Qantas First Class across the Pacific; second class sleeper to Chiang Mai; second class no-hope-of-sleeping to Agra; aircon superbuses and rattling Chinese biscuit tins; limousines and '68 Holdens; Aussie big rigs and gaudy Tata wrecks; elephants, horses and camel; hydrofoils, jetboats, ferries, yachts, rafts and long-tail boats
• Been to 25 countries: NZ, Australia (lived there 16 years), Thailand (four times), India (five times), Pakistan (twice), China (twice), UK, Greece (twice), Turkey, Burma (illegally), Malaysia, Singapore (several times), USA (many times, to NY,NJ,VI,PA,DC,MA,LA,GA,CA,TX,IL... nearly married a Jersey Girl), Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Belize, Honduras, Hong Kong (lived there 2 years), Macao (several times), Indonesia (worked there for several months), Philippines (several times, married to a Filipina), Korea.
• slept on rope beds; on a concrete shelf; on someone's front lawn; on desert sand; on the roof of a bus; rolled in a kapok mattress with a Kashmiri truck driver; on uncounted bus and train seats; in remote mountain huts; countless tents; in a yurt; on a luxury yacht; on a cruise ship; in the back of my car and van; in a Tibetan monastery
• seen some of the world's greatest sights, including the Taj Mahal, Iguazu Falls, Macchu Pichu, the Amazon basin from the air, the Royal Palace of Bangkok, Ruapehu, the Southern Alps, Anna Purna, the Imperial Palace and Forbidden City of Beijing, the World Trade Center and Empire State and Statue of Liberty, the NY Metropolitan Museum, MOMA and Getty, Ephesis, the Acropolis, Kew Gardens, Westminster, Lei, Kashgar, the Bosphorus, Sancta Sofia, Seoul, the Great Barrier Reef, Hayman island, Ayers rock, Cullamurra waterhole, the Great Wall of China, the Ice Cave of Zongo, Copan Ruinas, Guanaja, the Mekong, the Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Indus...
• met wildlife in the wild, like kangaroos, wallabies, dingoes, echidnas, wombats, dugongs, giant turtles, alligators, crocodiles, elephants, monkeys, baboons, tiger snakes, diamondback snakes, black snakes, cobras, funnel webs, tarantula, yaks and dzos, llama, vicuna, sharks, rays, whales and dolphins
• walked the mean streets at night and sampled the girlie bars in some of the world's meanest cities (in roughly descending order of "fear factor"): Belize City, Manila, Jakarta, New Orleans, Christchurch, Atlanta, Islamabad, Manhatten, Bangkok, Seoul, Sydney, London, Chiang Mai.
• rode on truck rooftops over one of the highest passes on earth (the Zoji La into Ladakh)
• walked to 5700 metres behind La Paz, fueled by coca leaves
• been on three 9-day cycle adventures until a head-on collision with a speeding car ended the bike but not me
• walked for two weeks over several >5000 metres passes in Ladakh
• lived with bikies and drug addicts and prostitutes
• lived with lawyers and diplomats and nurses and journalists and small business owners and IT professionals and...
• stayed in US$300-a-night hotels across India, and $5-a-night hotels with rope beds, toxic toilets and one with six inches of water on the floor
• waited to die of dysentry in an Islamabad "tourist camp" populated by East African heroin addicts, self-medicating with flagyl and phenyl-barbitol
• smoked dope in jungle clearings at night by the light of hurricane lanterns with Thai boatmen, chopping the ganja with machetes
• grown and sold dope to live
• turned down opium, cocaine, heroin, all sorts of pills: one day I drew a line and thankfully never stepped over it. But I'm sorry to say now that I abused tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, marijuana and hashish
• left town in a rental, passing the cops coming the other way to "talk" to me
• been detained by Customs for importing a Class A drug (three coca leaves in a diary, declared at the border; laughed off once I got a lawyer, but not before 12 hour delay and a strip-search. Pillocks)
• been detained by British Immigration for attempting to enter the UK illegally (laughed off once...)
• parlayed with AK47-toting rebel guards to get past their jungle river checkpoint alive
• stayed in a Thai brothel
• met the ruler and senators of a nation of 6 million people that nobody has heard of (the Karen State)
• walked alone in the wilds of NZ, Tasmania and Australia - came very close to dying of hypothermia twice, must be more careful
• abseiled down cliffs and a cave watefall
• steered a bamboo raft down two days of Cat 2 or 3 rapids without helmets or lifejackets or even shoes
• trekked across a glacier on a pilgrimage with thousands of others to see a holy lingam (a dirty ice staligmite that is supposed to look like a penis)
• bodyweight ranged between 66 kilos and 98
• loved some beautiful women and slept with many more, until I met the light of my life who stopped me in my tracks: my wife Vee
• and raised a wonderful brave, honest, clever, funny son Jack ("raised" past tense: he is 7 now, not much more we can do but feed him and try to steer him around dangerous objects)

I've done very little good in my life other than collecting for the Salvos a couple of times, but I have always been there for my friends, and I have never been in jail (a police station and a windowless customs interrogation room yes but not jail), injured anyone (physically anyway), or killed a warm-blooded creature. I have no tattoos, all my teeth, and the strongest things I ingest now are tea and Diet Coke, and occasional red wine.