\u2018I was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1971, but I don\u2019t really feel like I\u2019m from anywhere in England. My father was in the Royal Air Force so we bounced from RAF base to RAF base throughout my childhood. I thought of it as normal but in retrospect, it was quite a weird life because we were in a constant state of motion. I don\u2019t remember being attached to places, or possessions, because our lives were always being boxed up and shipped three months ahead of us. Maybe that\u2019s why I\u2019ve always been able to live out of a rucksack, and why friends remark I\u2019m always wearing the same set of clothes. If I ever fight with my wife, it\u2019s over packing, as I can do it (badly, she says) in less than three minutes.\u00a0 As children, we lived on bases all over the UK, as well as in Germany where my dad was on an exchange programme with the Luftwaffe, and Maryland where he flew US Naval jets like in Top Gun. He was a test pilot. His speciality was night flying. This was in the Seventies when jets had quite a high casualty rate; over a third of his graduation class died in flying accidents over the years. He left the RAF when I was ten and joined what became British Aerospace. My father was also a scientist. He invented the modern way of flying jets at night\u2014a helmet-mounted image-intensifier system called Cat\u2019s Eyes which remains the industry standard. I remember when he appeared with his invention on the BBC TV programme, Tomorrow\u2019s World. My father still works in the aviation industry but is based in America these days.<\/p>\n
After the RAF, my family settled in Kent, where my mother worked as a school teacher. I went to a local school there, then got a scholarship to board at Lancing College, near Brighton, when I was 13. I\u2019ve always had a lot of hobbies, slightly obsessive ones, which usually tend towards the slightly tech-y. When I was small, I designed rabbit traps, which were far too complicated to ever catch anything. When I was at Lancing, I got quite good at home brewing. I sold a lot of homebrew, like three, four gallons a week. Even the teachers were buying it. I then left to study classics at Oxford, where I joined the shooting team and my hobby switched to making bullets. You start with a mould, and pour in molten lead, then clamp it shut. That\u2019s the bullet. You resize a used brass casing, measure in some gunpowder, put the bullet in, crimp it. It\u2019s quite stressful. If you put too much powder in, the gases won\u2019t be able to come out fast enough and the gun will blow up. We never had any accidents at the club, but I saw a guy shoot his finger off like that.<\/p>\n
Oxford was a lot of fun. Academically I never quite excelled in the Ancient Greek I signed up for, but I enjoyed Philosophy and Latin, even if it\u2019s never had any impact on my future. Then a job in London with an ad agency, until I started a business called JohnHenry making record covers on an early Macintosh computer. Our first band was called Earthling, an EMI signing, then we got the Prodigy, who became our first big clients. We started doing their T-shirts and ended up naming a few of their records, fifty quid per name. Working in the music industry was carnage: there wasn\u2019t a lot of money, but it was a good laugh.<\/p>\n
We gradually shifted from record covers to corporate work, doing TV graphics and CD-ROMs. When the internet came along in 1997, it was a real Wild West. Everyone was blagging their way through. A client would ask if we could do something and we\u2019d think: yeah, why not? They couldn\u2019t ask to see what we\u2019d done before because no-one had a track record. It was interesting, but London wasn\u2019t for me. We sold the company in 2009, on a five-year buyout, which was hard. I was having to spend more time in London than I liked while my family were in Dorset. I was also having to juggle this pressure with my wife\u2019s commitment\u2014she\u2019s often overseas in her work as a journalist. During that buyout, I realised how rooted we really were to Dorset. Her parents and sisters, all local, managed to help us keep the family feeling secure as my wife and I came and went. We perfected \u2018the tag marriage\u2019\u2014catching each other at the door as one half arrives and the other leaves. We have two young sons for whom Dorset has only ever been home.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s very difficult to leave a company you\u2019ve set up; it\u2019s emotional. I didn\u2019t feel I could just walk out on my colleagues because I\u2019d got a better job in the same industry. Besides, I didn\u2019t want to get on the weekly Axminster-London train line ever again. I thought about starting a brick-oven business, because I\u2019ve made a few in my time for family as well as friends. But I couldn\u2019t make the numbers work. Fortunately, I was offered a job that was beautifully vague, although quite a lot further from Bridport than any of us expected. It was working in Kathmandu and Mongolia, running a cashmere weaving business, renovating Sir Edmund Hillary\u2019s house in the Himalayas, and building a football pitch for Sherpas into the side of a mountain. It was baffling, eccentric and amusing. Each school holidays, we decamped with the whole family. It was never going to be long-term but it was a perfect filler, and a proper adventure my children won\u2019t easily forget. It was during that slightly odd-ball year that I thought about setting up the food business, OutdoorFood, which I now run out of a converted mill in Pymore.<\/p>\n
The idea has been brewing since a trip I made to Greenland: a two-week, self-supported hiking expedition with my friend, who is a mountain leader. I ended up making my own dried food because I couldn\u2019t find any hiking rations I liked. It all tasted artificial, cheap, and unhealthy. So I started experimenting with recipes, using a home dehydrator. Fish from Bridport. Vegetables from Bridget\u2019s Market. Lamb from my father-in-law in Broadwindsor. No additives. No palm oil. All natural ingredients. It was a new hobby to obsess over, which got more interesting when I saw how shifts in dehydration technology could change the market. I fiddled with the pipework in the house. I converted part of our kitchen, diverted hot water pipes from our bathroom, and built a prototype commercial dryer out of wood and wire. The whole camping food industry uses freeze-drying technology, which is a different process, relying on vacuum chambers rather than ovens. No one else was making dehydrated meals, which is strange because in simple terms, the process is something like 12,000 years old. Eventually I managed to work out the challenges, and launched FIREPOT\u2014a healthy camping meal in a bag you just add boiling water to. We launched in March 2017 in a barn in Chideock. In January, I moved into bigger premises in a former mill outside Bridport. Our food has already been to the top of Everest and the South Pole.<\/p>\n
I married my wife, Sophy, in Stoke Abbott in 2000. Her parents had a farm there at the time. In 2001, we found a place in Marshwood, swapping our one-bed flat in London for a four-bed semi in Dorset with a spectacular view of the Vale. We bought our current home in Ryall in 2009. A total ruin, we couldn\u2019t move in for two years\u2014we camped in the field when my in-laws got fed up with our menagerie\u2014but now it\u2019s home. I spend most weekends taxi-driving the children to various activities around West Dorset. Sophy is coming to the end of a three-year book project in Siberia, so the new business has also allowed me to be flexible around her absences when she isn\u2019t taking us all with her. All of us love travelling, which is perhaps what an RAF childhood gave me at the beginning.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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