More Shameless Plugging

I will treat the comment that someone posted on this blog that "Like so many others - this blog seems to have 'fizzled out'... a typical CFZ related venture!!! " with well bred contempt. After all, the fact that there are several postings today is proof that he/she is talking nonsense. However, I would like to take this opportunity to stress that this bloggything is never gonna be a daily occurence. I try and do three or four postings a month if I can, but I am sure that you would all agree that running the CFZ and doing my best to look after a dying parent is somewhat more important than maintaining the blog..........

However, griping apart, I am pleased to announce that the latest in our series of perfect bound reissues of my books is now available: Only Fools and Goatsuckers.

(There seems to be some technical problem forbidding me to upload pix today :( so no cover shot for the time being)

In the eight years since I wrote it, I have often regretted the title—which, after all, makes no sense to anyone not familiar with the BBC TV series from which I cribbed the name (which means basically everyone outside the UK). But one - long forgotten - wag christened our younger, `Jack-the-lad` selves “the Rodney and Del-Boy of cryptozoology”, and the joke seemed appropriate.

The book should also, I think, be seen within its historical perspective. I was only 37 when I wrote this book, and although I had been working within cryptozoology for some years, I was still really a novice. This was my first expedition, and—with hindsight - I wish that I had done a lot of things differently. But I was then in the middle of a horrific divorce, and so when given the chance to let our hair down in foreign climes, Graham and I did so.

I look back at this book with fondness because, not only was it my first `expedition book` but it was written at a time when the Centre for Fortean Zoology (now an imposing edifice of an organisation, which is unarguably the biggest cryptozoological research organisation in the world), was just `The Last Gang in Town` (as Joe Strummer would have put it). It was a brave new world for Graham, Richard and me, and we were determined to take it by the horns and wrestle it into submission.

Nearly ten years on, we are older, wiser, and more professional, but this account of our younger, stupider, and wilder selves still has much to recommend it.