The Peripatetic Curmudgeon is my dad: retired chemical engineer, former pastor, traveller, writer, incurable question-asker, habitual over-thinker and occasional pain in the backside. He has lived a varied life — two-time emigrant, successful careers in Australia and Britain, faith, family, travel and now cancer — and has never been good at accepting things simply because someone says that’s the way they are. These days he writes about travel, getting older, leaving a controlling religious environment, discovering what he actually believes, and navigating life with cancer. Expect curiosity, humour, a healthy suspicion of easy answers and the occasional opinion he has been ruminating on for several decades.

We’ve watched Dad once again turn some pretty difficult experiences into something useful for other people. Mum has, of course, been beside him through all of it, along with the rest of us. As someone who cares deeply about raising awareness of coercive control in high-control religious groups, I’m especially proud of his willingness to examine his own past honestly and openly. He does wander off on the occasional tangent, but there’s usually something worth finding at the end of it. And when there isn’t, at least the detour is interesting!