About A. J. Blake

I am reliably told that I was born in Nigeria in 1952. I don’t, of course, have any memory of that and, over the years, I have come to suspect that such memories as I do have of a warm African childhood are drawn from second-hand stories rather than from the five senses of personal experience. They are no less vivid for that.

By the time I started school, I was living in a moderately large house in a leafy street in a well-ordered Surrey suburb. From there, five or six grey mornings a week, my father and thousands like him set off by train for their offices in London. It was never entirely clear to me what he did there. My mother tended a rose garden that became famous among our neighbours and, on the side, collected carved wooden masks from West Africa. There I remained, apart from two blissful teenage years in Geneva, until I went up to Oxford.

Oxford, ably aided and abetted by a long-legged German girlfriend and two summers in Greece, opened my eyes to a world of women and radical left-wing politics. After university I taught English in Paris for two years, travelled in South America for another year and then returned to London without any intention of settling down. Yet, despite my best intentions, there I stayed. There I married, had children, divorced, married again and had more children. There, for more than thirty years, I worked as an investment banker, as a management consultant and as a “civil servant”. It wasn’t nearly as boring as it might sound. Some of the work was actually totally absorbing. Some of it is still subject to the Official Secrets Act.

I retired from the City in 2010. I sold up in London (and Devon) and moved to Switzerland to live in an old wooden house with a glorious view over lake and mountain and to embrace postponed passions, among them hill walking, skiing and writing.