The Opportunist

About the Book

Most of us think we know ourselves, and some of us actually do. Clive Mason was neither—he didn’t care. Our protagonist, for he could hardly be called a hero, was one of the fortunate people; he loved what he did, did it well, and was successful. For him, it wasn’t the money—though that helped—but the buzz he felt when he’d completed what he’d set out to do. Many experience a “Road to Damascus” moment in their lives, and Mason is one of those. Though those of us who have experienced it know it can come in many different forms.

About the Author

He left school just before his fifteenth birthday and entered the construction industry with not one qualification to his name; he never even knew what they were. After a short while, he’d saved enough money to put himself through sea school and went to sea as a merchant seaman. There’s no better life for a young man than the sea; it forms the man that is to come. When asked, he calls it the University of Life. It was there he learned to read properly by persistent use during long sea voyages. To this day, he still cannot write in long hand for he is what today they call dyslexic. He left the sea in his mid twenties to marry his first wife as he knew the two do not mix. He returned to construction, and within eighteen months, he became self-employed. It gave him the freedom he was used to. By the age of thirty, he’d formed his own construction company having put himself through a polytechnic management course. This was quickly followed by development and management companies. All were successful. At the age of fifty, his first wife sought new pastures, and a short while after, he had a major road accident which kept him in and out of hospitals for the next two years. It was during this time, and with the advent of PCs that he could at last write, the spell check being a god send. At last he could give vent to his creative nature in a form that he’d grown to love in the navy—words. Doctors told him that the very active life he’d led in construction and development would not suit his many injuries, so he reverted to type and went walkabout once more. This time as an international trader mainly in the products he knew and understood: timber and steel. All that time, he still wrote mainly just to see if he could. On his travels, he met and married his second wife, and it was she, with her university education, that encouraged him to take his scribbling, as he called it, more seriously. So he did.