Today, I’m very pleased and proud to say, is my dad Bob’s 94th birthday.  I’ve just spoken to him and he’s on top form, as usual.  🙂  It also seems an appropriate moment to mention his book, or Memoirs – called Bobbing Along.

It’s been a long time in the making and publication, as it started life in the 1980’s as series of typed anecdotes, which were all stored in a folder.  Some years later, my younger brother, Steve, scanned these into pdf form, just in case the originals were ever lost.  Then late last year, I thought it might be a good idea to get them made into a book.  So I ran the pdf files through some OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software and turned them into a series of Word documents.

Somehow all the a’s became anything but a, so after around 3 months of editing and a bit of tweaking here and there, the finished document was sent off (electronically of course) to Book Printing UK (who, I have to say, were very good).  Three weeks later a physical proof copy was duly sent to me here in Switzerland to check.  A couple of minor modifications were made (mainly to the book cover) and we ordered 30 copies (for delivery in the UK) to distribute amongst our family.  (Sorry, it’s not available in the shops or online I’m afraid!)

See the Contents picture below, but the book is more or less his life history – from being a child, growing up in Hounslow, Middlesex, to joining the Royal Navy, where he became a Signalman and travelled all around the world.  (It wasn’t until he was in his 80’s that he travelled anywhere by plane!)  After the War, while on leave, he went to stay with his aunt and uncle in Yorkshire and that’s where he met my mum.  The rest, as they say, is history… 🙂