You can see short clips of me talking about my books on MeettheAuthor.com and on Amazon.

I teach for the very worthy Engineers without Borders, a voluntary organisation who train for development work. I shall next speak to them next on Staying Healthy and Effective at a week-long training course at Chingford on 22nd June. See: www.ewb-uk.org/cambridge. I give illustrated talks for the Humanitarian Centre on 'Health and Welfare in the Field'; these are in Cambridge usually in March.

Each Easter I present a lecture entitled Caring for Children Overseas as part of the week-long Travel Medicine course for doctors and nurses at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine www.lshtm.ac.uk.

During April and May each year I also run interactive teaching sessions on prevention of diarrhoeal disease and preparing for overseas work as part of the international health student selected short course at the Institute of Public Health, Addenbrooke's Teaching Hospital, Cambridge. The participants are fourth year medical students. I also teach first year Cambridge medical students about general practice.

Examples of my Writing

Hunting Celtic Spirals in the Dingle Peninsular, SW Ireland.

We turned our trip to the Dingle Peninsular into a treasure hunt for archaeological remains by checking out anything marked in red in Gaelic on the 1:50,000 map. Our guidebook told us that clochán means a ‘beehive’ hut – built in the manner of a dry stone wall without mortar, but cleverly shaped so that the stacked stones met at the apex of the roof to make a whether-proof home. We also worked out that a gallán is an undecorated standing stone, but the other unintelligible Gaelic descriptions made it challenging to find sites of significance, especially as we sometimes didn’t know what we were looking for. From a distance some sites looked like nothing more interesting than contemporary dry stone walls. Some turned out to be mere bumps in the landscape: ancient field systems or burial places. Others were superb early Christian carved obelisks or crosses. Bewilderingly the best of the crosses, which was decorated with intriguing Celtic spirals and starred on local post cards, was beyond several barbed wire fences and across a couple of squlechy fields.

In between our quest to find the best 1500-year-old carvings we ended up walking a spectacular craggy coastline whence, invigorated, we watched gannets dive-bombing fish and seals rolling with the swell. Grey smudges on cliff ledges turned out – on examination with binoculars – to be huge bags of fluff-covered blubber that were fulmar chicks sitting patiently awaiting the next regurgitated fish meal.

We enjoyed the local fish too and I indulged my bad habit of eavesdropping in pubs. I even heard old jokes making fun – not of Irish naïveté – but of the simplicity of the people of Kerry. And when I first saw a curragh rowed with oars with no blades there I did wonder about local inventiveness. Yet even in a seething pub (one of the best was Antarctic explorer Tom Crean’s house in Annascaul) where it is hardly possible to reach the bar and the excellent music makes communication difficult, good food arrives in no time and a niche is freed to enjoy seafood chowder or steak sandwich.

After five days exploring the Peninsular we headed for a site at the summit of a hill overlooking Dingle harbour. Here the red Gaelic lettering on our map promised a whole collection of oghaim stones, representing the earliest form of written Irish. The gate into the field bore a notice, ‘Beware of the Bull: visitors enter at their own risk.’

Just as we were deliberating whether this was a real warning or to discourage tourists, a large ginger bull with a ring through his nose appeared and blew disapprovingly at us. We tried another approach. At a second gate a local asked, ‘Do ya know where you’re going?’

‘Yes but we weren’t sure about the bull.’

‘Mmm well the wind is in our direction so you have the advantage. And maybe this will be the high point of your holiday – when you ran for your lives before a charging bull…’

We risked it. The hilltop was littered with rounded stones each over a metre long and carved with series of parallel lines so not exactly a sight to die for.

A shortened version of this piece was printed in the Traveller section of the Independent newspaper as Last Resort: Rocks of Ages (click here to read that version of the article).

Baby swap

Mothers offered to swap their babies for mine....

This was printed in the Independent newspaper (click here to read the article)

Flesh-eaters

Most of us will be mindful of malaria when venturing into the tropics but there are some altogether nastier, more squirm-making hazards. In central and tropical south America there is the cunning bot-fly which hitch-hikes on mosquitoes and lays eggs that hatch into flesh maggots.

In tropical Africa there is a beast with a similarly unpleasant lifestyle. The tumbu fly or putsi is related to the blow-fly. The female lays her eggs on clothes that have been left out to dry on the ground or pegged to a line in the shade. As with the bot-fly, larvae hatch and penetrate the skin when they sense mammalian warmth. They then cause crops of boils which ‘hatch’ 15mm club-shaped grubs that fall out after about eight days.

With both species clumsy removal attempts can lead to infection and scarring to it is best to seek advice: often locals will be skilled in maggot evictions. Putsi is avoided by ensuring that laundry is dried to crispiness in the direct sun, or everything is ironed: including sheets, nappies and the elastic parts of underwear.

Keeping covered with long loose clothes (preferably impregnated or sprayed with permethrin) and applying DEET-based repellent to any exposed flesh reduces the risk of acquiring these nightmare hitch-hikers.