The Story So Far!

In 1944, George East made a characteristically noisy entrance into the world when he was born in an air raid. The family lived uncomfortably near Portsmouth Dockyard, so George's fire warden father moved his heavily pregnant mother to a cottage on nearby Hayling Island. What Mr East did not know was that the authorities regularly lit large fires on the sparsely populated island to distract the Luftwaffe and its bomb supply from their true target. Thus our hero was born into a world of noise, upheaval and danger. This set a pattern, and George's mother never forgave Air Marshall Goering for targeting the East's greenhouse.

At 13, George decided to become a rock god. His group The Rockin' Hot Rods played in support of many top bands, but gave up when they were knocked out of the final heats in a national talent contest by a schoolboy trumpeter playing a selection of tunes from South Pacific.

Leaving school without qualifications, our hero decided to run away to sea. He only discovered that he had mistakenly stowed away on the Isle of Wight ferry when the boat docked at Ryde pierhead.

There followed a varied and sometimes colourful career path, which included stints as a brewer's drayman, mature student (until the university discovered he had forged his entry qualifications), welder, night club bouncer and disc jockey (often simultaneously), private investigator, demolition engineer, snooker club and hotel manager, magazine editor, journalist, radio station producer and presenter, and publican. In this role he was voted the Worst Landlord In Britain in two consecutive years after which the organisers scrapped the competition saying they would never find anyone more incompetent. It was during his time behind bars that the marital bed fell through the ceiling into the public bar and George became momentarily famous around the globe. A leading bedding company offered him a post as the world's first human bed-tester, and his job was to tour furniture exhibitions, leaping from the top of a ladder onto a bed below to demonstrate its indestructibility. A Page Three Sun newspaper model dressed as a French maid would lie spread-eagled on the bed to focus George's aim, but no historic charges have yet ensued.

1990, and in search of further adventures George and Donella crossed the Channel and set up home in a ruined watermill on ten acres of rivers, woods, lakes and mud in Normandy.

There, George wrote and published a series of books about the couple's life at the Mill of the Flea and their encounters with local characters and the way things were sometimes done quite differently in rural France.

Much to the delight of than their publisher and bank manager, the series became a massive and enduring hit, and George decided to make a career of writing about his travels, adventures and cock-ups around France.

Nowadays, the author is likely to be found in the foothills of the Balkan range of mountains in deepest Bulgaria, writing about his attempts to turn a dying village into a haven for artists, writers and other creative folk ...