Autobiography

About the Author

“Foresaw is a pseudonym for Simon Adam Watts born British on the 14-May-1955 in what is now the Yemen, Arabia. He was the fourth and last male child of his parents.”

You may feel the life of the author is of interest or irrelevant or you may view it as a “spoiler”. I have put a limited amount about me in my self-published books. I will put some more here in time and with feedback.

At this stage you will find the first version of my outline autobiography below. So read no further if this will spoil the stories for you.

I grew up going between England and Arabia. As the fourth child I was left to amuse myself on my own and I developed my imagination. We did not have a TV but lots of storytelling. This is a picture of the Residency,  I lived here for a couple of years aged 5-7.  So I guess by many standards I did not miss a TV – I lived in a fantasy world. This photo was taken in 1960 and printed on 35mm slide scanned in to my computer in 2002 and is now stored in a cloud.

 

The room at the top in the middle was the school room – this is where my “distance learning” took place with mixed results. The small hill at the back was overshadowed by a mountain that is out of view.

Aged eight I went to a boarding school for five terms. Not much joy – but at least not as long as my older brothers. When I was about ten I stopped going to Arabia. I went to a comprehensive school at eleven where I enjoyed anonymity, the school had well over a thousand pupils. I found written English and Arithmetic difficult but when I met Mathematics it was great. I was in the top set for maths and the third set for everything else.  I started to enjoy writing stories although I still struggled with spelling, syntax and grammar.

I mostly enjoyed growing up, but it is not something I would wish to repeat or even live again for the first time. My father died in a car accident when I was seventeen. I went to university – maths of course. I got a job with Shell Research and this was a start of a career in Shell that lasted nearly 30 years. In that time, I had two breakdowns about ten years apart. After I took early retirement I developed an interest in helping people recovering from mental illness and then increasingly in creative writing. Both aided by my interest in using computers to help me.