About Valerie

For those of you new to my blogs, they are day-to-day life, the little details as well as the vast panorama of history lived through 88 years of travel and turmoil – in fact, it’s a celebration of life with some humour and much enjoyment!

I’ve had an adventurous life, living through the Blitz in England, a stint in post-war Germany with my army family, living in the former “Beast of Belsen” residence at Belsen, travelling to school in Malaya in an armoured convoy through bandit-infested jungle, finding myself trapped in the middle of the first Red Guard march in Hong Kong during the Cultural revolution in China.In New Zealand, I once woke to find a grey-suited man with a stocking over his head in our bedroom during my husband Pat Booth’s fight to free an innocent man wrongly jailed for a double murder (he was pardoned at the end of the eight-year battle).

Then there was the time I found the wheels of my car had been tampered with to cause an accident when the Mr Asia drug ring – a world-wide drug ring my crusading journalist husband exposed – had put a price on his head.

I grew up in an army family, joining the British army myself. I was a captain when I married. Living in Hong Kong with my army husband, I had to learn journalism on the run when the marriage broke up in order to support my two children. Eventually I came to New Zealand with them aged five and six, knowing no-one, with no money, no job and no home, to start from scratch in a new country. We arrived with three suitcases, in which I’d packed sheets and cutlery to start a new home!

I was Woman’s Editor of the South China Morning Post before leaving Hong Kong, and in New Zealand became a writer at the liberal paper the Auckland Star, where I wrote a popular column for twelve years, and became Woman’s Editor, and at the same time wrote a column for families and children in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly for fourteen years.

Since leaving full-time journalism I’ve written for magazines, and written a few books.

My main ‘hobby’ is the spiritual life, others are gardening, reading, cooking, moving house and restoring and re-decorating the new hovel, friends, music, opera, pets and people watching (there must be more).

Arthritis in my hands has compelled me to give up knitting, embroidery, and painting. I don’t have dogs any more, but over the years have had seventeen, mostly rescued, usually three at a time, including three afghans, two salukis, a borzoi, a labrador, six King Charles cavalier spaniels, a boxer, a mastiff-boxer cross, a mastiff, plus the lodgers – the dogs who came to spend the day with me while their owners were at work !

And of course, like the rest of us, I worry about preserving our planet before it’s too late.