This is the shadow I cast on a Brazilian beach nigh-on fifty years ago. I drew it during one of the most memorable times my life, when I walked alone for nearly 300 kilometres along what was then a tourist-free and largely road-free strip of palm-fringed paradise beaches in Bahia. I was that cliché of the age: a guitar-playing dropout. 

Only a few months previously, largely as an accident of birth (my brother was a well-known columnist), I had been London writing jokey stories and captions to pictures of bare-breasted young women for the tabloid Sun, and wondering what on earth I was doing with my life. I drifted about the world for the next nine years and it was another five before I plugged back into the mainstream world.

The story of those wild days on the road, and particularly the three years I spent in India, is the main reason that I set up this site. I have written two books about them, one a memoir called Joker, and the other a ripping yarn called Tigger and the Tantric Princess which I see as a synthesis of some of the ideas I drew from my travels. Both are what I call singing books, because they are linked to songs that I wrote over the years.

Few people have heard my songs, leave alone read my books, for the very good reason that they haven’t been available. I’ve been lying low since the 2009 closure of Personal Computer World, the magazine in which for 15 years I charted the development of computing and the web. If you find it odd that an old hippie would end up writing about that, then you are probably too young to remember the curious alliance of New Age idealism, academic nous and military spin-off that characterised the early days of the internet.

I was lucky. Dropping back into the mainstream a long time after dropping out can be hard, and a lot of people never manage it. Sadly, these included my old schoolfriend Hugh, who set off with me and shared much of my time on the road. He features a lot in Joker. But then Hugh never wanted to drop back in, or so he said when he was not ruing the fact that he had blown his acting career. He was a walking entertainment, which was success of a kind.

My luck lay in the fact that I dropped back in the early eighties just as computers were becoming generally available, and I had been thrown out of university with enough technical savvy to understand them. Few journalists at the time did, so I soon got work writing about them. I’d fallen into a front-seat view of the biggest cultural revolution since the invention of writing. 

Even the closure of Personal Computer World was lucky for me. It had lost ninety percent of its advertising to the web but if it had staggered on, I would have staggered on with it because I loved the work, which happened also to indulge my taste for travel. But in truth my time had passed. The important developments in personal computing were in how it was being used by young people who had been poking away at keyboards and screens since they were barely out of nappies. They were the new cyberworld, and the new cyberworld was inventing itself. I was on another planet, but it was one on which I now had the space and time to write about other things, and record some of my songs.

Apart from a few jaunts, that is what I have been doing — the lovely drawing above by my friend John Rowley sets the scene. This site is me beginning to show my head. I’ve just published Tigger and the Tantric Princess and its associated album of songs. Joker will follow soon, with more songs. I’m dropping back in again.