Travel

Canned coffee and Kimonos is Tom Fitzmaurice’s memoir of the four years he spent living and teaching in Tokyo, the biggest city on Earth. A young man from England’s rural West Country, he was thrust into a new world for which he was completely unprepared and which he found utterly bewildering. Tom gives an insight into the life of an English teacher in this most fascinating of countries and how he found his feet teaching students aged two to ninety-one.

From sitting in a robot restaurant watching a giant metal triceratops firing multicoloured laser beams, to the quietude of secluded and ancient mountain-top shrines on remote Japanese islands, this is a story of coming of age in a beguiling metropolis, of culture shock, faux pas, joy, hilarity, horror and the steepest of learning curves.

Earthquakes, hedgehog cafes, bathing with the yakuza, love hotels, typhoons, geisha, nuclear fallout, fascists, festivals, temples, bullet trains, karaoke, samurai swords, sushi and sumo. This memoir has it all.

A rare, realistic and entertaining insight into a world shrouded by embedded suspicion and judgement. Sahera Patel writes about her year living and working in Saudi with a refreshingly honest determination. She reveals the reality of Gallardos and glamour juxtaposed with a deep reverence of religiosity and spirituality. Her tales of strong women with independent minds slap the exaggerated media image across the face whilst her personal experiences of a subtle tyranny reveal a dark reality.

From the tales of the taxi drivers to the exploits of the powerful, Sahera Patel provides a refreshing reality told through amusing anecdotes. Her ability to show humour in the most uncomfortable and even dangerous situations is a rare talent and guaranteed to entertain whilst unveiling an Arabia hidden from the Western eye.

Sahera Patel is a forty-four-year-old primary teacher, born-again student and now, a real-life author! Forming coherent sentences with the English language has always been a passion of mine, but the routines of life came in the way of becoming a published author. Marriage, work, children and the responsibilities of day-to-day life restricted my ability to free the author in me, but finally, after years of perhaps and maybes I have achieved my goal.

My first book is I’m not a celebrity I am a Muslim, and being an autobiography, the content was not difficult to find, and the second one, Unveiling Arabia, also didn’t prove a struggle in terms of material as it recounts my year spent in Saudi Arabia, teaching and living in the land of the Arabs with an intense heat and desert sands as far as the eye can see.

The front cover of my first book is a picture of myself taken by my twelve-year-old son in Kerala, India and the second cover is a picture of two colleagues and close friends at the Al Rahma mosque in Jeddah.

The author Bob tells us: –
I have had a long and extremely interesting career full of twists and turns. At eighteen years of age, I played keyboards for two blues bands on Merseyside. I then became employed in the travel business for fifteen years until I was made redundant. My next career move was to be-come a videographer, which continued for thirty years. As a sideline, for a few years I had small roles on TV and in film, including ‘Scandal‘ in 1989.

Later in life I began writing poetry and articles for UK and US magazines and more recently wrote three songs with Frankie Collins from the soul/funk band Kokomo, who are still going strong. However, my greatest achievement is to complete this book after so many years of writing it. After going to Thailand in 1998, it tells the story of how I became involved in the welfare of dogs on the beaches of Koh Samui, in particular one we named Gypsy.

It details our adventures over two consecutive holidays, including heart-warming moments as well as seriously dramatic events. Attempting to bring her to England proved to be considerably traumatic with many problems and disappointments, but we overcame those and happily homed her in Bollington for thirteen years. Her life with us is well documented in the book, as are our further visits to Koh Samui to work at the Dog Rescue Centre as volunteers.

Journeys with Open Eyes is not a travel book although it provides a wealth of information about places far-away and sometimes very close to home, both locationally and psychologically. Nor is it a history book, although the author, Hugh Roberts, was present in or around many of the world’s trouble spots immediately before or after some of the epoch-making events of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Journeys … is a book about people. As such it is concerned with Hugh’s empathetic approach to members of the human race, be they indigenous residents of the High Andes, Soviet functionaries, Arab princes, white South Africans of the Apartheid era and numerous others. There can be no doubt that empathy helped him in his career as an international Urban Planner but empathy like this is only found in those with a genuine love for humankind.

He judges systems of government but rarely the people operating or imposing them. As a result, he invariably gets the best out of his fellows whether as friends, work colleagues or chance acquaintances. Journeys … will entertain and educate the reader in full measure and should be required reading for all who care for the inhabitants of this planet.

After graduating from the Universities of Oxford and Wales, author Hugh Roberts spent over forty-five years in planning, design and development consultancy for new towns and urban, industrial and regional infrastructure. He worked for some of the largest built environment consultancies in UK, the US and Australia and lived and worked in a wide range of countries throughout all six continents.

Following a series of professional journal publications, for example, in the Middle East Economic Digest, he wrote An Urban Profile of the Middle East published in 1979 (Croom Helm). They were taken over by Routledge/ Taylor & Francis who published it again in 2016. In 2017, he wrote Journeys with Open Eyes: Seeking Empathy with Strangers (i2i Publishing), a travelogue and biography of the projects and people with whom he interacted with across multiple working and domestic cultures worldwide.

The book is partly serious commentary on trends in urban development, but also anecdotal about bizarre situations – some mundane, others hilarious and a few even life-threatening – encountered through a long and varied career. Fractured Society: Causes, Effects and Resolutions is Hugh Roberts’ third.

In Pursuit of the Slam: My Year Travelling to Tennis’s Top Four Tournaments tells the story of the author’s year out between jobs during which he attended all four of tennis’s Grand Slam tournaments.

Unhappy in his corporate job, tennis fan Mark Cripps decided to pack it all in and start again. But a chance sighting of an old friend in an in-flight magazine led to an idea: Why not take some time out to travel, organising the trip around tennis’s Grand Slam tournaments?

He made a plan to attend the 1992 French Open, Wimbledon, the US Open and then, returning to Australia in early 1993, where he had been based with American Express, the Australian Open. On the way, he would visit places of interest, catch up with old friends and visit other tournaments in the build up to each Slam, including the Italian Open in Rome.

The book describes how the author organised the visits to each Slam, once there, securing tickets and watching the tennis daily. A club tennis player, the book also tells how the author entered a tournament on the new British Tour and the experience of facing opponents of a much higher standard. Following the US Open, a week spent at a tennis fantasy camp helped confirm the next steps he needed to take when his trip was over.

In Pursuit of the Slam: My Year Travelling to Tennis’s Top Four Tournaments is told in an anecdotal style including the story of the author’s childhood introduction to sport, where his mother’s love of Wimbledon was so infectious.

A nostalgic look back at the professional tennis tours through the prism of a round-the-world trip, the book will appeal to those interested in tennis, especially the professional game back in the nineties and the history of British tennis in general; those keen on travel; anyone needing a change of job or career; or those who just want to make the most of their interests.

Mark Cripps was a corporate marketing executive and then, an award-winning tennis coach specialising in junior development. He now lives in Greater Manchester where he is senior editor for the publisher of this memoir, i2i Publishing. This is his first book.