About You Will Never Amount to Anything by Gerald Hogg:
When I was four years old, my mum took me and my brother to Jamaica to join my dad who had been transferred from London to work in Kingston Town as a foreman scaffolder on a twelve month contract. There began my love affair with island life, sea, sand and surf. A few years later, when we came back to the UK we moved to Middlesbrough in north east England, my dad’s home town. We went from living like royalty, on a sun drenched island, surrounded by palm trees, clear blue seas and golden beaches, to living in impoverished conditions in a cold, colourless northern town, with steelworks and two chemical plants polluting the air with noxious gasses. I made a promise to myself then that I was going to get out of that town and get back to Jamaica or some other island or country where there were happy smiling faces, blue seas, parrots, beaches and sunshine as soon as I possibly could. The day I left school for the last time, was the day the school broke up for the Easter holidays. The headmaster had decided that the few pupils who were not staying on to do their CSE or GCSE exams and who were leaving school for good on that day, should leave at lunch time. There were only six of us and we were escorted from the school grounds by one of the teachers. When we were approaching the school gates I heard a voice from behind yelling “You lot will never amount to anything, you’ll all end up as drunks, unemployed or in prison” I recognised the voice straight away, it was Mr Bagley, my science teacher, who had bullied, tormented and beaten me at every opportunity over the past four years. That just made me more determined to get away from England and start a new life in the tropics. His words have stayed with me to this day, and they have given me the strength to prove him wrong. I have had to cheat, lie and live by my wits to achieve my goals but since that day I have never looked back. I have worked as a chef on cruise ships, five star hotels and restaurants around the world, been to the Antarctic, lived in ten different countries, own four investment properties and a share portfolio, had my own successful advertising business, own a beautiful house on the Gold Coast in Australia, own a boat in Boracay in the Philippines, wrote and had a book published on how to retire in Thailand, and I now live on the beautiful island of Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand.
My life’s been fantastic Mr Bagley. How about yours?
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Author Bio:
I am originally from England and spent most of my life working as a chef on cruise ships and in hotels and restaurants around the world. I have lived and worked in ten different countries including, Jamaica, Bermuda, Australia, The Falkland Islands, The USA, Papua New Guinea, Singapore and The Philippines. I retired to Thailand four years ago with the intentions of becoming an author in my retirement and I currently live on the island of Koh Samui.
I have written eight books to-date, my first book “The Retire in Thailand Handbook (The first six months)” was published worldwide by London publishers Austin Macauley in November of 2019 and I have written four other travel-related books aimed at retirees and baby boomers in my “Retirees Travel Guide Series of Books”. I have also written a historical novel “The Deptford Mask Murders” which recounts the first-time fingerprints were used to solve a murder in the UK in1905, and the outcome that would change the way police forces around the world would be able to identify criminal suspects by the ridges on their fingers, as well as my biography “You Will Never Amount to Anything”
Last month I published my latest book “Thai Died Murder in Paradise (Coronavirus has come to Koh Samui but so has another Killer”. I started to write a book in April of this year when I was in self-isolation after I contracted the coronavirus. While I was in lockdown and seeing the effect that the virus was having on the world, I decided to write a suspense novel that was centred on Covid-19 that would highlight the difficulties and frustrations that any police force would face when trying to solve a major crime during the worse pandemic in over 100 years, at a time when most of the population, except for essential services were told by their governments to stay home to stop the virus from spreading.