Lebanese Nuns Don't Ski

So what would you do if your wife ran off with a hairy truck driver?

A drunken moment of clarity sent the author out of his local pub in Oxfordshire down to the M40 motorway, armed with little more than a daypack and a fluorescent orange cardboard sign 'South Africa', in a half-baked attempt to put distance and perspective to his pain.

What started out as self-indulgent escapism quickly turned into an educational journey of other people's suffering and loss, which helped put personal events into context. From visiting the prisons of Rwanda, gun battles in the West Bank, being held at gunpoint in Kosovo and playing Stalin's piano in Georgia, to causing a bomb scare in Jerusalem, surviving a plane crash in Eritrea, a hospital visit in Somalia and a friendly rat while camping in Madagascar, this nine month trip from local pub near Oxford to local pub near Oxford via the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and Africa brings to life the lives, loves and losses of the people and places encountered.