I’ve begun to realise that reasonable portions of my life are now appearing in other people’s books. I don’t think I actually feature in them but it’s still my life. Here’s how it works:

I lived and worked for a year in Burundi and if you want to know what that was like you can read the relevant chapters from Ed Walker’s Reflections from a scorched earth because Ed was the guy who I handed over to when I left the country.

This year my friend Simon Guillebaud, who I met in Burundi,  is publishing his second book, Dangerously alive : an African adventure of faith under fire – so expect more Burundi tales there.

Not long after I returned from Burundi I went and worked in Kosovo for three months and you can read about what Kosovo was like in Emma Stratton’s Famines and Face Packs. Because Emma is the lady I handed over to in Kosovo.

Now my friend Mark Powley has written Consumer Detox and my life is in there too. I went to university with Mark, we studied on the same course, shared many of the same friends and we shared a house together in our third year. We started Breathe together with some other friends. So some of the stories in this book are also stories from my life.

Now that’s three or four books covering the last ten years of my life and there wasn’t much in the first twenty years or so to write about. I guess I could be jealous but really it’s just a privilege to have lived a full life and been around these people and places.

Has anyone else got this experience of their life in other people’s books?