Book excerpt: This is the story of a boy born in a two-room terrace flat who had quite a normal life but struggled with his own weaknesses until he finally got married, had children, and started traveling. He has written down his experiences as a child in the 1940s, as a teenager in the fifties, and as a young man in the sixties and then wrote about his experiences while traveling the world during his working life, which, when read, suggests he did not have such a normal life after all.