What I’m Reading

JACK WALSH was born in November 1937. Three generations of insurance industry executives determined, unequivocally, his future. However, even that could not keep him from the sea as he was always fishing. Still wet behind the ears, he inherited one of the first true country insurance brokerages, together with the instilled principle to the extreme of “honesty is the best policy”. The business flourished, leading, he says, to his first big mistake when he sold an excellent business for which he was never paid, to concentrate on the sea. Fifty-two years later, he has finally retired. All in all, his adventures and experiences are extremely entertaining, exciting, at times comical, and very insightful in the fields of commercial fishing and sea diamond discovery, about which very little has been written. He has recently released A Lifetime of Fishing.

RECENTLY I have read, for the umpteenth time, The Sea Angling Fishes of the Cape, authored some hundred years ago by C Leo Biden.

It is so well written and so good at reminding one of the incredible damage mankind can wreak to the natural resources of our oceans.

It also affords us a picture, however dim, of just how munificent these were in the not so distant past.

I am, and always have been, from the age of 10 or so, an avid and eclectic reader from research papers to autobiographies; from PG Woodhouse to Jackie Collins; from Laurence G Green to Clive Cussler.

I look upon reading as a continual source of furthering my education, even at my age, and as a necessary escape hatch from life’s never-ending tribulations and stress.

I like to lose myself in a good adventure novel, be it fiction or otherwise, and no matter how light the readability turns out to be, you are subconsciously still learning all the time.

It never ceases to amaze me how so many people, of course, in increasing numbers in these days of television, actuality programmes and social media do not realise the pleasure one gets from a good read.

I have just finished Clive Cussler’s Floodtide, one of his best and still totally pertinent in this sorry world of ours, although it was written twenty years ago.

I have also just finished Bryce Courtenay’s Matthew Flinder’s Cat, possibly destined to become a classic, and David Baldacci’s Split Second.

In all of these I was able to lose myself in the surreal adventure plots.

Some other of my favourite authors include Wilbur Smith, a friend of mine in the past, Nelson Demille, Penny Vincenzi, Jeffrey Archer, amongst many, many others.