When I left school, I went into engineering and became a sheet metal worker. I got my apprenticeship. It was whilst I was doing that, me and a friend one night, both played rugby together, and we thought we were both in a rut, so we just met in a local pub and says “Right, we’re going to pack our jobs in.” And we did!

And we decided what we wanted to do – we wanted to go to either Australia or Canada. We spun a coin - I won, so we went to Australia. And that began a long journey - we actually backpacked to Australia when I was 24, and that was also Europe, Asia.

One of the highlights, if you can call it a highlight, we were in Athens in 1967. We’d met an American guy when travelling, and we’d met up again in Athens. He was American, so he could use American Express traveller's cheques, and he could also get cash dollars, not foreign currency, for your dollar traveller’s cheques. Also, you can have your mail forwarded.

So he’s collecting his mail and all of a sudden, from nowhere, she gave him his passport back, didn’t give him his mail, slammed the shutters down. We walked outside and there were tanks everywhere. It’s when they threw King Constantine out in Greece, when they ended the monarchy.

So we were stuck in Athens for a week – but no problems, it didn’t affect us. Then we toddled off and went further north and up through Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Penang, Malaysia, Indonesia, and then we were going from East Timor to Darwin. We originally thought we’ll have a month in Darwin, then go down to Perth – do all the capital cities and all the states, and then pop off to New Zealand, and then come via the Pacific.

Anyway, we got stuck in Darwin – such a great little place, there’s only about 20,000 people. So we settled there for a while, then I got itchy feet again and met another lad, ‘cause the lad I went with got married and had a kiddie by this time. I decided to drive around Australia, which I did – through Queensland, Brisbane, New South Wales. And I came back up through the centre, via Coober Pedy where they live underground. It’s an opal mining town, but it’s so hot that they tunnel down - it’s so cool underground.

Back up to Darwin, I got another job working on an island called Groote Eylandt - it means ‘big island’ in Dutch. And then we packed in our jobs again, me and another lad, a Canadian guy, and decided to come back to the UK.

So we got a plane to Hong Kong. Unbeknown to me, he had a Chinese pal who had gone to the same university as him in Canada, but instead of using the university campus he stayed at my friend’s parents. So he said “Look us up!” So he took us all over Hong Kong, so instead of just going for a few days we had a month there. And then via Thailand, and then straight home back to the UK, got back in the swing of things.

That’s when I got the travelling bug. Since that I’ve been to China, Saint Lucia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Egypt – in fact I’ve just come back from Egypt. I did Morocco, Turkey and Egypt in the last five months. So I’m looking forward to my next jaunt!