AREN'T ALL NOVELS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL?

Whenever I told friends that I was writing a novel, the most common question they asked was 'is it autobiographical?'.

The simple answer is no. I wasn't brought up as the only son of a sheep farmer in the Yorkshire Dales, I never lived in Hong Kong and I haven't run a dotcom company. That said, there are several passages in the book which draw directly on my experiences.

In chapter 2 Tom almost veers off the road when he sees a dead cow dangling by its hind legs from a fork lift truck in a roadside farmyard. I witnessed that whilst driving to a walk in the Dales and like Tom, it was my first introduction to foot and mouth disease in North Yorkshire. I went on to see many of the sights described in the book over the following months when local farms were in the grip of the disease - the disinfectant precautions, the excavated pits, the funeral pyres and the white-suited 'Angels of Death'.

I travelled to the Far East in 1982 to make a series of documentaries for BBC Radio 4 called 'Something to Declare' and several passages in the book describe events which took place on the trip to Hong Kong, Thailand, China and Malaysia.

Tom talks in chapter 9 about going to the Golden Triangle near the Burmese border and getting caught up in a skirmish between US-funded Thai government troops and opium warlords. That happened to me and Bernard Jackson, the series presenter. We were driving along a jungle track when we heard machine gun fire close by.  Our driver interpreter slewed to a halt and we all jumped from the pick-up truck and dived into a ditch. As the bullets flew disturbingly close, Bernard took out a pack of cigarettes, grinned and offered me one, saying "Last cigarette?". I accepted it, which was a bad move as I had given up several years before.

We later spent the night in the hill tribe village Tom describes and it was there we saw the dead body of the young girl which so affected him in the book.  It affected us deeply as well and Tom's reaction to it was very much what I felt at the time. As an aside, my descent on the slippery slope to smoking again was hastened in the village when our interpreter suggested that it would only be polite to accept the trumpet-shaped cigars which were hand-rolled in our honour at the end of a meal. It was that, and possibly the copious amounts of Thai resin which our interpreter had about his person which had me once again hooked on the evil weed by the time we reached Hong Kong several weeks later - staying in the Mandarin Hotel, as do Tom and Sally in the book.

On the way to Hong Kong we made a programme in Malaysia. Tom's recollection of swapping the names of cricketers in a ramshackle bar with a group of old Tamils in chapter 10 took place when Bernard and I wandered through the back streets of Penang.

In chapter 12 Tom is in the window seat of a bar in New York when several NYPD officers outside pull their guns on a young black man they'd slammed against the window. It happened to me on a trip to New York to record an exclusive interview with Yoko Ono for Radio City in Liverpool on the fifth anniversary of Lennon's death. Like Tom, I was directly in their line of fire.

Perhaps more mundanely, The Swaledale Sheep Breeders' Association does indeed exist. In chapter 14, Tom attends their dinner. I'm a keen musician, playing Hammond organ and keyboards in several bands, and a couple of years ago I played a gig in Hawes at their annual dinner. I faithfully describe the weather on that evening in the book when a sunny August day suddenly turned into a dismal night of drizzle.

In case you haven't yet read the book - and if so, why not! - I won't give away the ending.  But suffice it to say that the world event which scuppers Tom's attempts to save his business also had a serious knock-on effect on my video and conference production business.  A client for whom I'd made a video went into liquidation when their funding was withdrawn as a result of the event, owing me a considerable amount of money. It was that which gave me the idea for using the event as the cause of Tom's failure to retain control of his business.

All in all my book is peppered with personal predilections and prejudices, fantasies and fears, as well as fictionalised experiences. But autobiographical?  Definitely not.