28 Years, Six Subjects, One Job

The Objection, Answered

I live in the little island paradise of Nosy Be, Madagascar. On paper that is the objection, so let me spend it early: I work GMT+3, three hours ahead of London, one ahead of Malta, which means your working day is covered from its first hour rather than its middle.

I am a connection away from your office in Europe, and closer than you would think to Asia and Africa. I am happy to come to you for contracts from one week to three months.

I hold a British passport, and Europe, the UK, Asia and the African mainland are all within striking distance. In many ways it is the perfect base, and Starlink means I am just as available as I would be in London or Sydney.

The First Career

I started in motorsport: National Racing Editor at Motorsport News and Autosport, then editor of F1i.com, which I took from nothing to a million users a month in the sport's first internet boom. Deadlines measured in minutes, and a readership that knows more than you do about the one thing you got wrong.

Then twelve years as European Editor for Motor Trend and European Car, which mostly meant being handed the keys to cars worth more than a house and being asked to have an opinion by Thursday. Features for The Sunday Times, MSN and Tatler alongside.

That career taught me the line I still test every page against: enthusiasm is not the same as authority.

The Second Career

Technology, then crypto, then firearms, then gambling. Somewhere in that run the job changed shape: I stopped writing the piece and started setting the standard, then building the thing that enforces it.

In a licensed market the standard cannot live in a style guide nobody reads. It lives in the pipeline: validation gates checking brand rules, structure and jurisdictional restrictions before a page reaches the CMS.

The 28 years are why the AI work is worth anything. I did not discover editing through AI; I brought three decades of edited pages to the tooling and made the judgement executable. An enthusiast can build a pipeline that publishes. It takes an editor to build one that refuses to.

I Still Get on a Plane

Remote is where I live, not the limit of the engagement. I travel to clients for one week to three months on site: market launches, platform migrations, post-acquisition integration, compliance remediation. Work that needs someone in the building for a while and then does not need them at all.

Malta, Gibraltar and London are the usual hotspots, but work has taken me to Macau, Monte Carlo and Macclesfield in recent times.

The Whole Run