About Rupert

I am a nerd. Much of my adolescence was spent on platform four of Reading station (where the train to Basingstoke departs). I have got a cupboard full of notebooks containing train numbers but fortunately grew out of that. So now I’ve got another cupboard full of notebooks containing bird sightings.

OK obsessive nerd. Fortunately my understanding wife and four tolerant children dilute such tendencies.

Being a farm vet for Penbode Vet Group in Holsworthy in SW England is a top job. Especially in the summer when all the cattle are out at grass and looking  happy and well.

Apparently I have aged prematurely. My chums all basically look the same as they did 25 years ago. I look like their grandad. This is because I use to fry appalingly in the sun during all-day surf sessions when sun cream was basically cooking oil. Also after a year travelling in Africa, not only did my skin look like one of those mummies that appear at the bottom of a glacier in the Andes, I weighed about as much as one of them as well.

My all-time megaheroes are:

1. Captain Sensible (guitarist with punk band The Damned). What an idiot!

2. David Attenborough.

3. Sean Morley. First to kayak solo around Great Britain.

I am currently doing a long term kayak trip called ‘Up The  Creek’.

This involves paddling around the entire coastline of SW England in my sit-on-top kayak, based from Holsworthy. So south down the river Tamar then round to Lands end along the south coast, and down the river Torridge (flowing north and starting only 5 miles from the Tamar) and down to Lands end along the north coast of Devon and Cornwall. So virtually a complete circumnavigation. And  up EVERY estuary creek and inlet until I run aground. Nearly 600 miles so far completed, about 80 to go.

Oh yeah, should have mentioned, I fish from my kayak as I go.

That's me on the right