I left Britain in 2006 when I was 28 because I was starting to suspect I'd somehow bought a ticket for a ride I didn't remember agreeing to.
On paper, things were fine. I had a decent job, a flat in South London, a car and all the usual equipment you're supposed to collect as evidence that adulthood is going according to plan. The problem was that everything I owned seemed to own a small piece of me back. Every month my salary arrived and within days the mortgage company, council, railway, insurance companies and everyone else were standing around it like seagulls fighting over a bag of chips.
Then there was the commuting. That magnificent British institution where millions of people spend part of every morning travelling somewhere they don't want to be, then spend part of every evening travelling back from it. I was working to pay for the flat I left empty all day because I was at work earning enough money to pay for the flat.
There was nothing catastrophically wrong with my life. That's the point. I wasn't destitute. Nobody was chasing me through London with a pitchfork. I just looked at the whole arrangement and thought, is this really the fucking deal.
So I sold the flat and left.
That was twenty years ago.
Since then I've lived and worked in Spain, Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. I worked in the oil industry for years, then built a GIS company in Seoul. These days I live near the beach in Vietnam, spend part of the year in Malaysia, go back to Seoul for the business and return to Britain to see family.
Somewhere along the way I realised that what I'd escaped wasn't Britain. Britain was just where I happened to be standing when I noticed the problem.
What I escaped was the default setting.
That's what Terminal Exile is about.
It's about money, work, time, property, business, investing, travel, risk and all the strange little arrangements we're handed when we're young and expected to accept because everybody else seems to be accepting them.
Get a job. Buy the house. Get the better car. Get promoted. Borrow some more. Save into the pension. Keep going. Don't touch anything. Don't ask too many awkward questions. Then, somewhere in your sixties, if the government hasn't moved the finishing line another five miles down the road, you can have your time back.
I was never very good at that.
I've got nothing against work. I've worked my bollocks off for most of my adult life. I've got nothing against money either. I like money. Money is extremely useful. Anyone claiming money doesn't matter has either never been skint or is about to sell me a course involving breathing exercises.
But I don't want money sitting in the driver's seat.
That's the distinction I keep coming back to.
Money can buy investments. It can build businesses. It can pay for flights. It can put a roof over my head. It can buy a decent dinner and a few beers. More than anything, it can create distance between me and things I don't want controlling my life.
That's useful.
The number itself doesn't interest me much.
I don't want to spend forty years accumulating money and then discover I've treated my life like the good furniture in somebody's grandmother's house, covered in plastic waiting for a special occasion that never fucking arrives.
The same goes for work.
Building my company was one of the best things I ever did, but I didn't build it because I wanted the word entrepreneur attached to my name. I can't think of many things that would make me want to leave a room faster than being introduced as an entrepreneur.
I built it because I wanted my own machinery.
That's how I think about business. It's infrastructure. It sits underneath my life and keeps the lights on. It gives me options. It means I don't need somebody from Human Resources deciding whether I'm allowed to spend three weeks somewhere because I've only got fourteen days of annual leave remaining.
I've also developed a strange relationship with risk.
Selling a London flat and leaving Britain probably looked risky to some people in 2006. Staying there looked risky to me.
That's the funny thing about risk. People talk about it as though it's sitting on a shelf with a price label attached. Safe job, low risk. Starting a business, high risk. Mortgage, sensible. Moving overseas, dangerous.
I'm not convinced.
Depending on one employer for my income has always looked a bit like sitting on a one legged stool and congratulating myself on how stable the furniture is.
Owning my time matters more to me now than it did when I was 28. Back then I thought time was something stored in a warehouse and there'd always be another delivery coming.
I'm 48 now.
There isn't.
That doesn't make me miserable. Quite the opposite. It makes a lot of decisions easier.
Money comes back. I've lost money before and I'll lose money again. Markets fall over. Investments go wrong. Businesses have good months and bad months. Sometimes an unexpected bill appears looking pleased with itself.
But I can't earn another Tuesday.
So this website is where I write about all of that.
Not as advice.
I'm not interested in telling anybody how to live. The internet has enough blokes doing that already, usually standing beside a rented Lamborghini with their arms folded.
I write about the decisions I've made, the things I've got wrong, the things that worked, the systems I don't trust and the things I've noticed after twenty years of living outside the country where I started.
There'll be money in here because money matters.
There'll be business because owning my own infrastructure changed my life.
There'll be investing because I find markets fascinating and occasionally fucking ridiculous.
There'll be travel because leaving home gives you perspective that you can't get from reading about somewhere.
There'll be Britain because distance has a strange way of making certain things easier to see.
And there'll probably be quite a lot about time because, underneath everything else, I think that's what I've been buying for the last twenty years.
Not retirement.
Not escape in the sense of sitting on a beach doing fuck all until I die.
Control.
The ability to decide where I am, what I'm working on, who I'm working with and what gets my attention.
That's my version of being rich.
Terminal Exile is the record of how I got here, what I've learned along the way and whatever happens next.
No grand plan. No seven steps. No course at the end of it.
Just one bloke who looked at the standard deal twenty years ago, decided he didn't fancy it and walked out through the side door.
Anyway, that's enough introductions.
My coffee's getting cold.