The earliest ever picture of me - aged about 3 (that was in 1962), on the island of my birth, Singapore. Note the bruise on the right knee. Then, slightly older, in traditional Malay costume. Managed to pick up some more hair by the time I was five. That t-shirt, by the way, was one of my favourites. By that time I had nurtured by bodily functions and coordination enough to be able to ride a tricycle. Note that same t-shirt.

By the time I was fifteen, a regular diet of books on Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon convinced me that I could only find true happiness in life by enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. However, my relative brilliance in the academic field quickly throttled those aspirations. At the age of 17, I was offered a government scholarship to study civil engineering and was soon packed off to Britain.

Student life in London was difficult with the allowance I was on, but I took to the city like a duck to water. The black and white picture is at a meeting of the Socialist Workers' Party. By this time, I had become deeply involved in labour politics - ah, the idealism of those days!

Leading the vanguard of the proletariat against the hegemony of the petit bourgeois did not prevent me from sparing some time for my studies. Here am I (centre) in Holland, learning how the Dutch build dykes and dams to prevent their country from becoming part of the English Channel. Also found time to visit friends in Spain. Here am I (above, far right) somewhere in Alicante pretending to be a militaman fighting a guerilla war against Franco's Fascists!

But I had to return home sooner or later - as a trainee engineer with the Ports Section of the Public Works Department. I put my studies to good use by helping to build a jetty near my dad's home town of Alor Setar in the northern part of the country. Much to my surprise, it still stands today! However, I wanted to be a writer, and I soon got the chance when I joined a local English daily, the Star, as a journalist. I stayed with the paper for two years - despite the fact that, just one week after I started work, it was banned by the government for five months for subversive reporting! Fortunately, the government didn't take much notice of my writing - but IBM did. They soon hired me as a Media Relations Executive where I had the thankless task of entertaining Asian journalists on junkets to product launches in the US. A dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

After four years helping to sell million-dollar grey boxes, I felt that I needed to do something more with my life. That's when the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) were looking for a Communications Manager - so I hung up my tie, put on the jungle boots and joined the nature conservation cause. Didn't quite give up the white shirts, though. It's not all tromping around in jungles in WWF, you know. There's a lot of travel to more urban settings in meetings overseas where I have the opportunity to discover, for example, the delights of the irritatingly efficient Frankfurt subway system. I was soon promoted to Director of Communications in WWF. This meant a lot more responsibility - such as speechifying and looking good at fund raisers. Working for WWF allows you to meet all kinds - such as this little feline I found wandering on a trail somewhere in Taman Negara National Park.

I now work for TRAFFIC - the international arm of WWF and World Conservation Union that monitors international wildlife trade (tiger bone, elephant tusks, rhino horns, that kinda thing). I'm based in Cambridge, UK, and live in a quiet English village just on the outskirts of the town.

You'll find out all about my interests at my other websites below. I am a Trekker, fancy myself as an amateur historian, study Egyptology, fly World War II planes on my computer, look after a pride of cats and surf a lot on the Internet. Right now, I'm deeply committed to and involved in the Reformation Movement in Malaysia (some may say up to my neck in it!) Well, that's this nut in a nutsell.

Explore these websites below (they're all mine!) and hope you enjoy my kind of madness.