The South East Asian Tsunami

In 2004 I visited Thailand for a three week schools tour to Bangkok and Phuket, excited about the trip and the new novel As Good As Dead In Downtown.

I had no idea how prophetic the story would prove to be.

As Good As Dead In Downtown, a thriller set slightly into the future, is about an extraordinary teenage boy Kai who can hear the distant rumblings of the tectonic plates as they shift against one another out beneath the ocean. Sensing that a huge destructive tidal wave is on its way, Kai makes preparations to escape. No one else in the coastal town believes the wave will come...

Following a reading and talk I gave at a school on Phuket, some of the audience expressed doubts that such a giant wave could ever in real life strike Phuket's shores. I explained how the story was of course fictional. The original idea had come from a recurring dream I had had four years ago, but I had researched the possibility of such giant waves before writing the novel.

I met such wonderful people during my stay. The hospitality I received there was second to none. We had some great, very animated discussions. Like all the children I met in Thailand on that trip, the children in Phuket were bright lovely kids who responded to my visit with enormous affection and enthusiasm. When the school day was over I visited Laem Sing beach for a swim. Lying there on the golden sand it was easy to understand why the students had been so sceptical about the possibility of such a destructive giant wave. That beach was about as close to paradise as it gets.

Little did we know...

The death toll, grief and suffering caused by the giant waves that struck on 26th December 2004 were enormous. Some children, parents and teachers from schools I visited were casualties.

The effort to rebuild communities and schools still continues.
I have more recently contributed a short story to 'Higher Ground' a collection of stories about true life survivors of the tsunami. Money raised from sales of this book is going directly to charities that help survivors of the tsunami and to also to survivors of the recent earthquake in Kashmir.