About me

I am fascinated by learning and change. My path to where I am right now has been long and full of false starts, which all contribute to my own, very personal trajectory.

I am a woman. English. In my mid-forties. Married. Two children. My husband is Italian and we live in Rome. Before coming here I lived my baby years (till 5) on the Caribbean volcanic island of Montserrat; my late teens and early twenties were on and off in Italy and France teaching and studying; from age 23 to 26 I lived in Japan in the warm and welcoming town of Fukushima, now sadly famous for the tsunami and radioactive damage in its wake.

I cook, I run, and I think. I love working and throw myself into all I do with more energy than is probably healthy. If I cook, I make pasta from scratch and source little known vegetables that make me happy. When I run, I want to train to do a marathon. I drink coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon and wine in the evening.

I love people, I love their differences and their unique gifts. It has been said of me that it is totally unflattering being my friend as I do not discriminate well and just kind of like everyone indifferently. That is not completely true, but almost.

Professionally, I was a teacher, a language teacher for 14 years. I can recognize a comma when I see it and care. One day, I moved to the world of agricultural research for development and discovered the world of development, agricultural biodiversity and gender. I took a postgraduate qualification in Global Development Management, and got drawn into a deep fascination with Systems Thinking – ways of thinking about change in a world of complexity, with multiple perspectives, interconnections, interdependencies and uncertainty. I am still actively working on that – reading, talking, thinking, swapping ideas. My actual day job sees me packaging ideas up in words – project proposals, reports, articles and strategies. Wonderful multi-dimensional ideas to which i try to do justice through long strings of text.