Aged twenty-one and still shaking my head at my University's decision to award me a degree I went in search of useful employ. Uncertain, like many at that age, I wondered what best to do. In the third year of my higher education I had been dispatched to teach in an inner city secondary school in Marseille, France. Despite the fact that the school campus where I was lodged had all the allure of a detention centre and that my pupils lived lives that were peppered with prostitution, drugs, gunshots and squealing tyres at midnight, when we were all in the hot, mesh-windowed classroom huddled round my tinny cassette player singing along, with nods and smiles, to U2's 'Wizz or wizzout you', I felt I had discovered a niche.

Trawling the adverts in the Times Educational Supplement, I found myself to be surprisingly in demand. I was to spend five remarkably happy years teaching in a small town in Somerset. Employed as a teacher of French and German, I quickly widened my portfolio to become Head of Ping Pong and Master in charge of Jujitsu (which primarily involved me being used as a punch bag by over-enthusiastic twelve year olds). I put on plays reasonably and coached hockey badly, travelled widely and made a whole new raft of friends - all in all I had a wonderful time. Then someone started muttering about a career and I set off to be 'Head of Department' in a school just over the border in Devon.

Then, after another five years of teaching which, too, provided me with so much enjoyment, all of a sudden a worm turned. I had visions of being old and grey and still at school but now locked behind a desk from behind which I only came to meet parents or berate children. This combined with a fairly catastrophic romantic life and a bizarre coincidence pushed me onto quite a different course.

The last six years have seen me living in and writing about the South Pacific where I helped to set up a chicken emporium, India, where I taught some wonderful children in the slums of Pune and became an unlikely Bollywood hero and Africa, where I finally became a headmaster – if only for three weeks – and, more importantly, was coach of the Kasane Kudu’s – Botswana’s finest Under 7’s football team.

My adventures in the French Alps: ‘Another Long Day on the Piste’ will appear in a good bookshop near you on November 2nd 2006.

In the meantime I am on assignment abroad. Watch this space…

I hope you find this website interesting and, above all, enjoy the books. Let me know!

Will

Copyright Will Randall 2006. All rights reserved. Site designed by Etype Media Ltd