Böcker av Alastair Ashford-Brown

Alastair ('Lala') Ashford-Brown was born in 1953 in the heart of rural Wiltshire. He attended Marlborough College, one of England's top schools, from which he was expelled for cutting down the school bells celebrated by Poet Laureate John Betjeman. After a brief period as a shepherd on Exmoor where he had his heart broken for the first time, Lala set out to seek solace on the roads of Europe where he wandered for nearly twenty years in the pursuit of meaning and the magic he felt to have vanished from life and above all to find romance and adventure, both of which he found along with much despair. He travelled with the Gypsies and lived with them in their great encampment in the Pyrenees. He drank, he fell in love, he lived on his wits and broke the law and was imprisoned in his beloved Greece, where he started to write his story: Hedges, Ditches and Dreams (Tales from the Flames of Youth). The poems in this volume are those he wrung from his blood over the years.

Alastair Ashford-Brown (Lala) grew up in Wiltshire on the edge of Salisbury Plain and attended the prestigious public school Marlborough College, from which he was expelled for cutting the rope of the school bell, after which his real schooling began as he set off on the road to seek romance and adventure.Hedges Ditches and Dreams recounts some of these adventures: how he learnt to survive on his wits, his meeting with Gypsies in the vineyards of France and his subsequent departure with them to live in their great encampment in the Pyrenees, clinging on to the outside of a train from Paris to Lisbon in pursuit of the lady of his dreams, shipwreck on the Baltic, imprisonment in a Greek jail, and encounters with some of the picaresque characters he met on his way. It tells the compelling story of a turbulent youth, of drunken escapades and passionate love affairs, evoking a Europe of traditional rural life and Bohemian cities in a world which has now largely disappeared.Alastair Ashford-Brown is the author of Hedges, Ditches and Dreams and two books of poetry: Songs of Sorrow and Joy and Nets in the Wind.