About
About
About 1: The Well-Travelled Hat
This section was supposed to be primarily about Rowan MacNeill, but that all felt a bit . . . egotistical, so maybe it would be more fun, at least at first, to talk about The Well-Travelled Hat. This is headware that’s seen service on three continents, and it’s got its own story.
You’ll have seen The Hat on the Home Page (and that, by the way, is the city of Palmyra in Syria, in the background, before the Islamic State arrived and destroyed it) so maybe you wanted to read more?
The Hat was actually made in China (it said so on the label), but MacNeill bought it at a gas station in Louisiana, just outside New Orleans. The Hat then flew back to Britain, returned to America to visit New York, went home, went to Egypt and back, travelled around Uzbekistan, returned to China (where it was briefly stolen by a young lady at the Silk Street Market, see picture below), went to Syria and then went to India.
By now, The Hat was somewhat battered and frayed and – sadly – it met its end at about two in the morning in the overhead locker of a Boeing 767 on the runway at Delhi airport, crushed beneath the suitcase of a lady who insisted – insisted – that the huge valise that she and the stewardess had struggled to lift above her head (and which needed repeated shoving to force the door closed) was, in fact, hand luggage.
The Hat, is gone, but not forgotten – and now it’s got its own web page.
Meanwhile . . .
About 2: Rowan MacNeill
Rowan MacNeill was born in Middlesbrough, on Teeside, into a family with roots in England, Ireland and Scotland. He did most of his growing up in Liverpool after his family had moved there; at school, he was very good at all the sports that involved moving in straight lines but not so much when they involved going round corners.
And even from an early age, he found himself fascinated with stories.
He studied Engineering at Kings’ College in London. He might possibly have learnt something there, but more importantly he met his wife, to whom he has now been married forever (although, she would concede privately, for her it may seem longer).
Along the way, he did an assortment of jobs, greengrocer, barman, dishwasher, labourer, electrician, interpreter, technical draftsman – until he settled into his actual profession of Engineering, building bridges and roads and railway stations, airfields and office blocks and houses, even some shopping centres.
The best part of his career, the part he enjoyed most, was the extraordinary variety of people he dealt with, ranging from the simply splendid to the criminal (and the possibly criminally insane). His technical knowledge became so wide that he now feels that he knows an infinitesimal amount about practically everything.
And all the while the urge to devise stories, and to write them down, remained with him. With a busy job and a growing family, time was tight, but somehow he assembled his ideas and started to put them on paper.
These days, when not writing, or walking the dog, or socialising, or doing bits of consultancy or playing the piano (largely for his own amazement), he occasionally does exciting things like flying birds of prey.
Rowan MacNeill lives on the Hampshire/Berkshire border, with his wife and an English Shepherd dog with too much personality.
