A Lifetime Ambition Achieved

When I was a young child, my father asked me, "What would you like to do to leave your mark in this world"? It was a very profound question to ask an eight-year-old, and one that I couldn't answer at the time, but it was also one that never really went away. Throughout my life, I've tried to do as much as I can to fulfill my potential. I learned how to fly an aircraft, have driven across most of the planet and even had something brought up in Prime Minister's Questions. Yet still, the conversation about how I should leave my mark never really went away.

Skip forward a few decades and the answer dropped into my lap almost by accident. I was working on an event in London with Kathryn West, who is the subject of the book. I knew she worked in the police force, but what I didn't know were the things she'd done throughout her career. It was only after having a chance conversation where she was talking about a particularly rough day at work that the idea dawned on me. A few day's later, I approached the subject and asked if she'd ever fancied the idea of having a book written about her? Thankfully, she said yes, she'd considered it but still had three years left in the force so couldn't do anything about it at the time. We agreed to keep in touch and put the idea to bed for a while.

A couple of years later we were about to start, but then my personal life took a bit of a turn as tragically, I lost my wife to cancer. It was a devastating time and quite frankly ripped me apart. During this time the world at large was also gripped in the middle of the pandemic. Clapping for the NHS became the norm and every night millions of people tuned in to watch Boris Johnson address the nation. The book was put on hold again and I thought this thing is never going to happen!

However, in January 2023, Kathryn and I finally got to sit down across my dining room table. I turned on my recording device, had a notebook at the ready and we started to chat. Over the coming months we would repeat this process and little by little our book started to form. Two years later, From Handbags to Hand Grenades hit the shops in Paperback and Kindle. Followed by six months after that came the audio version too. Now, I can finally answer my father's question and say... I'm a published author with a book that is being sold all around the globe. It's taken me nearly 50 years to get there, but I did it in the end...

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