My family was broken before I was old enough to understand what being broken meant. I learned early that families are rather like houses: from the outside they can look perfectly respectable, while inside everyone knows which floorboards are rotten and nobody wants to be the one who steps on them.
I was not, by nature, a particularly well-behaved child.
I became a carnival worker, a club promoter and a barman, which was probably the closest thing I ever had to a proper education in human nature. Carnivals taught me that people will pay good money to be frightened, astonished, spun around at considerable speed, or persuaded that a man in a waistcoat knows exactly what he is doing. Clubs taught me that people become considerably more interesting after midnight. Bars taught me that, given enough alcohol, everyone eventually tells you the truth. Or what they believe to be the truth. Occasionally the difference is important.
I was, for a while, a smart arse. I say this in the past tense because I am trying to appear mature.
It isn't working.
I traveled. A great deal. I crossed borders with more enthusiasm than paperwork and discovered that rules, like maps, are occasionally suggestions written by people who have never actually been where you are going. I bent rules. I ignored some. I broke a few. I learned the difference between those three things rather later than was advisable.
I have been the black sheep. I have been the person who was not invited and turned up anyway.
I became a door to door insurance salesman, which was possibly the most dangerous thing I ever did.
I discovered that you could persuade people to spend money protecting themselves against things they hoped would never happen. This required a particular talent for optimism, pessimism, persuasion and a straight face. I possessed all four, although not always in the correct proportions.
I have always been rather good at acquiring things. There is an entire class of useful person in the world whose principal qualification is that, when you ask them, "Do you know where I can get one of these?" they pause for a moment and say, "What exactly do you mean by one of these?"
I have always liked those people.
I have also been the person people called when something had gone badly wrong and nobody else knew what to do.
Sometimes I knew what to do. Sometimes I merely looked as though I did.
There is a surprisingly large amount of difference between the two.
I became a father. I have not always been a good one.
There are things you understand about yourself only after somebody else has had to live with the consequences of your decisions. Fatherhood is particularly efficient at this. Children have a remarkable ability to expose your hypocrisy, your impatience, your selfishness and your failures, usually before breakfast.
I loved them.
I failed them.
I tried again.
Sometimes I did better.
Most times I did not
That is the honest version.
I discovered that animals are generally more straightforward than people. If an animal dislikes you, it usually tells you and If an animal trusts you, it usually means something.
People are considerably more complicated and occasionally more dangerous.
I have been a friend.
I have been an enemy.
I have been both to the same person, sometimes within the same week.
I have collected stories in the way other people collect scars. Some were acquired deliberately. Most simply happened to me.
There were years when I thought I was looking for somewhere to belong.
There were other years when I thought belonging was simply another word for being trapped. So I kept moving.
I worked in places I had no business being in. I met people I had no business meeting. I crossed lines that were probably there for a reason and occasionally discovered that the reason was me.
I have been lucky.
I have been stupid
The two are not always as different as people imagine.
I am now bored.
This may be the most dangerous thing that happens to me
Boredom has always been the beginning of something.
A journey. A scheme. A bad idea. A new obsession. A door that probably should remain closed.
I have lived enough lives to know that respectable people are often considerably more interesting than they pretend, and disreputable people are often considerably kinder than their reputations suggest.
I have been both.
A. Jay is a pen name, which is convenient because my actual life has accumulated rather too many names, occupations, stories and explanations already. I am old enough to know better. I am experienced enough to know that knowing better has never stopped me. I have spent a lifetime collecting the sort of experiences that make excellent stories and terrible explanations.
These books are what happens when I finally decide to put some of them down on paper.Vitam testiculis arripere.I have been doing my best to live by it.

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My mother was a cartographer who refused to map anything she hadn't personally walked, which made her professionally admirable and domestically catastrophic.
My father arrived on a boat. He left on a different one.
We do not discuss this.
We have, in fact, never discussed this, as he left before I developed the necessary vocabulary and has not returned to give me the opportunity.
If he is reading this — hello. You owe my mother an apology and me a considerably better childhood.
I was educated in various country's some which, no longer exist, which I choose to take personally.
I studied chemistry because my uncle said languages were for people with something to say. I studied five languages to prove him wrong. He died unconvinced.
This is the central tragedy of my life and also possibly his.
I then did things I am not at liberty to discuss for people I am not at liberty to name in places that officially do not exist.
Signals intelligence, they called it. Listening to other people's conversations without their knowledge or consent, I called it, but nobody asked me.
I was good at it. I am still good at it. I am doing it right now, in a manner of speaking.
I have lived in eleven countries. I have been asked to leave four of them. One of them asked very nicely and provided a car to the border, which I thought showed real class. The others were less gracious.
I bear several grudges. I am working on it.
I currently live in Tangier-Tétouan where the light does something in the late afternoon that I have been trying to describe for seven years and have so far managed only "yes, like that, but more so."
The mint tea is aggressively sweet. I have made my peace with this.
I speak Medieval Latin because someone had to and everyone else was busy.
I speak Aramaic because a man in Italy bet me I couldn't.
I speak Caló because a Roma woman in Seville said it would save my life and has so far been correct on two occasions that I am aware of and possibly a third that I am choosing not to examine too closely.
Ivory F Wild is a pen name.
My real name is, for reasons that are partly legal, partly geographical, and partly the result of a clerical error in 1990 that I have given up trying to correct, an administrative inconvenience in three jurisdictions. Ivory F Wild is simpler.
It is also, if you look at it carefully enough, an anagram. I will not tell you of what. Half the fun is the looking.
I am old. I have seen a great deal. I have kept most of it to myself on the grounds that the truth is either too boring or too alarming and neither serves anyone well over breakfast.
My books are the things I eventually decided to stop keeping to myself.
I make no promises about their accuracy.
I make no promises about anything. I have found this policy saves considerable time.
Omnia aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est.
Seneca said it first.
I have simply been proving it longer.

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A Note About My WritingI am, and always have been, dyslexic.Reading isn't really a problem for me, although these days I do need glasses. Writing is a different matter.
All I can say is that a phone's spell checker was a Godsend.Unfortunately, it didn't solve everything.When I am writing and completely in the flow, what comes out can be total gibberish. Seriously.
This is of no concern to you, the reader, because you get to see the finished work.I use AI as an assistant.I write. AI helps untangle the words, put the spaces in the right places, and make sense of what I have actually typed. It allows me to have my work proofread, helps me with research for my manuscripts, and can help break up paragraphs and organise things when necessary.Where I live, finding a human proofreader who is both available and affordable is not always realistic. So, for me, AI provides something I otherwise might not have access to: an assistant who can go through what I have written and help me turn the gibberish into readable English.
AI isn't very smart. It can also mess things up. I have to check what it does — often, very often, way too often. And I've found that swearing at it doesn't do much.But the important part is this:Everything you read is from my mind and in my words — even the big ones. None of it is AI speak.AI doesn't supply my ideas, my stories, my arguments or my thinking. I write the work. AI simply helps me get what I have written into a form that other people can read.If you would like to know more about dyslexia, the International Dyslexia Association has information and resources for people with dyslexia and their families:https://dyslexiaida.orgThese are our books, and all I want is for people to enjoy them.If only life was that simple.

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