Some background on me. I was born in 1948 in the last year before the NHS was formed. We lived in Swindon with my paternal grandmother. My mother was from Sunderland and met my father in Wales where she was working in a laundry during WW2. My father had worked on the Great Western Railway before the war and went to college after it. Obtaining a qualification he got a job with Unilever  at a lumber camp in Sapele, Nigeria. He worked eighteen months in Nigeria, three months home. He died before his fortieth birthday in 1960 at work.  I left school in 1963 at fifteen years old, with a Northern Counties School Certificate in nine subjects. It turned out to be useless for finding work. Options were coal mine or armed forces. I chose the Royal Navy, and found I had a fascination for the sea and foreign travel, which I still have. After training my first ship, a tribal class frigate, sailed from Plymouth to the Caribbean via Bermuda. The West Indies and Florida in 1965 (aged 17) was brilliant. There were no tourists, the world was free of tourists, and we had it to ourselves. The navy took me also took me to Asia, South Africa, Gibraltar, and the Mediterranean countries. Following nine years in the navy, I spent two years in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, which took me on a tour of South America and the west coast of the USA. I then did a course to be a TV engineer, but I never worked as one. Instead, I got a job with Decca Navigator. This company had onshore beacon stations for the positioning of ships at sea. An early GPS system. The company was funded by the Rolling Stones first album on Decca records. I was with them for a year, then in 1976 I left them to join Marconi Space and Defence Systems in Fife. Got married and moved to Scotland. Stayed at MSDS for five years, then went back to sea with Subsea Offshore as an ROV Pilot/Technician. My first overseas job for them was Brunei in October 1981. Worked offshore for forty years running a Robot Submarine (ROV) crew world-wide, between 1990 and 2020 as a freelance. I have worked on many different projects, including, drill Rig support, pipeline surveys, seabed surveys, seabed construction, platform installation, platform demolition, salvage, windfarm installation, bomb/mine disposal. I was the supervisor of the ROV crew on the Piper Alpha Toppling Project. I also survived a helicopter crash landing in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea.

My last offshore ROV job was the Chanhua Offshore Windfarm Project in Taiwan, aged 71.

I had every intention of continuing offshore work for as long as I could pass the offshore medical.

Then the offshore industry went into recession, followed by my wife being diagnosed with dementia, and  Covid-19 struck.

My wife requires full time care, which is me.  I have survived bowel cancer and (so far) bladder cancer. Now that I can no longer work offshore, I am occupying myself with affiliate marketing and as a Health and Wellness coach.