I was a singer-songwriter in the UK band Cosmic Rough Riders. Our journey from cult status to ‘chart botherers’ saw us tour extensively around the world and perform with major acts including Lenny Kravitz, U2, Paul Weller, Robert Plant and Tom Jones. Being part of a touring band enabled me to fulfil a lifelong ambition to travel, to see how other cultures lived, worked, laughed, ate; to see how they ‘ticked’, essentially. I wasn’t disappointed. I encountered warm hospitality in every tiny corner of the globe I found myself in. It was on a visit to Corfu, however – ironically on a break from touring – that I became acquainted with ‘filoxenia’, the Greek concept of hospitality, and where I fell in love with Greece for the first of many times.
Fate somehow decreed that the only Greek I had ever met in the UK music industry, and who had now found herself based in my rainy hometown of Glasgow, was to become my long term partner. It’s been through organizing trips for friends that I discovered my love for revealing Greece, in all her beauty, to others.