I'll be dead by the time I'm 40....

Bloody hell, Vic, what's with the title of this first post???

Don't panic! I'll be 55 next month, so all good and I'm not dead yet.

However, for a long time, and I don't know where this idea came from, I strongly believed I would not live past 40 years of age. I think it began in my teenage years but for the next 20 years I was damn sure I was going to get out life exactly what I could because I wasn't going to be around for long.

At the age of 19, I moved from a little village in Staffordshire, England, to work for Her Majesty's Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London. Soon after reaching 21, I was posted to New York City. Since then, an awful lot has happened and I've been fortunate to have travelled all over and worked for some extremely smart (and rich) entrepreneurs and executives. For 30 years, I resided in the US.

Now Happy Henry's! is in its 5th year, I'm looking at ways to help more people and more dogs.

It's recently been brought to my attention (thank you, lovely Leslie) that having a blog is a great way to connect with more amazing dog guardians and professionals. It'll also give me a chance to step inside my brain (if you dare) to see what goes on in this rather erratic and scatty brain. This will be less structure and more stream of consciousness so proceed at your own peril.

OK, fair enough but please get to the point

Well, years ago (2006), perhaps during a mid-life crisis, I decided in my (questionable) infinite wisdom

that I would back-pack around Europe by way of the alphabet. I haphazardly meandered my way around the continent, ultimately visiting 26 places (town/city/village), each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, and each place was located in a different European Country.

Now, just to make things more difficult for myself, I let people I met along the way pick the names of the place I needed to visit next out of a hat..... I also had to stay in each place for at least one night--whether they had accommodation readily available or not. Oh, and don't forget the fact that I'd self-imposed the rule I wasn't allowed to travel by air. I could only use trains, buses, cars (hitching rides), boats, or bicycles -- at one point there was a farm cart but let's not dwell on that).

Why are you telling us all this when it's not related to dogs in any way, shape or form?

First, the final challenge I gave myself was to write a blog every day I was on the road. At the time, I had an idea that I wanted to be journalist (I have a lot of ideas). Let's just say the stress of having to put out a piece of writing I was satisfied with (did someone say "perfection paralysis"?), the challenge nearly killed me. Literally.

But I did actually manage it all, in a rather non-perfect way. Over the course of five months, I wrote something for Europe On An Alphabet every day and I had an amazing bunch of followers who gave me support and sent positive thoughts to help me get through it. At one point, I got a mention (like a little snippet) in The Martha Stewart Magazine (anyone remember that??!) and apparently had over 250,000 unique visitors to my website from all over the world. Where are they now, I wonder?

Unlike me, something that is dead is the blog and it's no longer available. I do have a hard copy of all the posts I did and contemplated turning into a book at some point but now realise I can't commit to anything that difficult.

Second, prior to my trip around Europe, I had a little dog named Chester (see, a dog does come into this somewhere). He was a miniature schnauzer who came into my life while living in New York City. Another of my crazy ideas, besides being fascinated with travel and the alphabet (did you know there are so many options for traveling by way of the alphabet?), I created Travels with Chester, another idea that would be series of children's picture books about a little dog who traveled around the world to different countries and learned nuggets of information from each, including: how to count to 5 in that country's language; how to say "hello" and "goodbye," as well as "please" and "thank you". Chester also visited a famous landmark in each country and learned a little bit about that too. Oh, and he was a greedy little munchkin who'd eat anything, including unmentionables during our morning walks in Central Park. I decided that when visiting the places in the books, Chester would also try a local cuisine and get curious about the different tastes and smells.

So this my first post. A quick brain dump to get me started. I won't be doing it every day, but as and when I feel I have something worthwhile, or not, to say, I'll drop a little note to you.

I hope you get some entertainment out of the things I share. If not, no worries. There are plenty more you can check out, so jog on....

PS: before anybody goes off to check, you cannot travel around the world alphabetically by country name (or at least you couldn't back in 2006). You could travel around South America on horseback by way of the alphabet, but according to my dad at the time that idea was close to insanity and he wouldn't help me out if I got stuck....... thanks dad x