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Over some years, I covered major news events - the capture of James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King's murderer, the hippie phenomenon, the emergence of major bands such as the now defunct The Band and much more for Time magazine. I've interviewed Marshal McLuhan - a great gentleman, John Lennon (nice guy) and Sir Laurence Olivier who was a bit waspy before a performance.
Yes, I'm getting older and should be writing my own book. Instead, I ghost for other people. It's quite lucrative and there's something great about getting the tongue-tied to open up about what they want the world to know about them.
I've travelled a lot and written about it or used it in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentaries and so forth. Delving into Hindi movies turned out to be a lot of fun because of people like Pinky Virani and Shashi Kapoor.
During an overland trip from Kathmandu into Tibet, I recorded two little girls singing while tossing what looked like hay, examined the Indian media, Nepal's deforestation, worked as a cook on an English barge and travelled on a French one as a writer. To write a magazine article, I took a calligraphy lesson in Tokyo (hard work). While writing a travel piece I nearly drowned on Lake Titicaca in high winds and was only saved by a very resourceful Peruvian boatman who tore pieces off his tee shirt to bung in the holes where the water was rushing into the vessel. He guided us to safety It was no fun being followed around Moscow when it was part of the Soviet Union(another story). There's been some relative ease - a food piece-cum-profile on a great woman inn keeper who had run away to rural France after a bad love affair turned out to be sybaritic. Over a career you do a lot of things.
I'm proud to have written a Chatelaine piece that led to women having greater power to obtain credit and of a documentary series on Childhood for CBC radio's Ideas. A piece about the environmental and dietary causes of cancer for the now defunct Weekend magazine had the editor gleefully fighting off complaints from the medical establishment. My findings were bang on.
I review books for newspapers. Kildare Dobbs, a great writer and very nice man, got me into it when he was the Toronto Star book editor.
I discovered I like writing essays by doing some for the Globe and Mail.
Like most writers, I have a day job. Mine's in communications and film. I run my own company.
One funny thing - I went to the same London school as Nigella Lawson.