Simon Matkin - Author of 'The waiting Game' & 'The Property Game'
and now 'Beating the devil'
News Flash
Ian Robertson Spoke wonderfully at The Property Game' Book Launch
"Ian Robertson has appeared regularly on BBC TV for over 20 years including Rugby Special and Grandstand and he spent 3 years from 1980 to 1983 as the Rugby Correspondent for The Sunday Times".
Ian Robertson has also written 30 books including the ghosted autobiographies of Bill Beaumont and Andy Irvine, 2 books with Gareth Edwards and the family biography of Richard Burton. To persuade Elizabeth Taylor to write the foreword to this book, he was forced to spend a whole week with Miss Taylor in Hollywood!
In the summer, he masquerades as an expert on horse racing for BBC Radio and over the years has had numerous tiny shares in a succession of very slow horses that lacked any sort of ambition.
His most memorable on-air moments are Scotland winning the Grand Slams in 1984, against France, and in 1990, against England, plus Jonny Wilkinson dropping the World Cup goal in 2004"
Extract from biography
http://www.gordonpoole.com/?ArtistID=1045
The author was born at the old St Leonard’s Hospital in Sudbury so, like Tommy, qualifies to be a man or rather boy of Suffolk. He began his education at his mother’s Nursery School in Friars Street at the age of three and learned to both read and write before his fifth birthday, not bad by today’s less than exacting standards. His first taste of formal learning came at the long defunct Salter’s Hall School in Stour Street. His only two recollections of that ancient establishment is his first beating by old Conroy and, far more memorably, sneaking his first kiss at the precocious age of eight with a pretty pig-tailed girl outside the classroom on the rickety first floor balcony during an English lesson!
For the above temerity he was exiled to boarding school at Woodbridge at the tender age of nine, first to The Abbey Preparatory and then on to the senior school until his insignificant exit in 1966. His memories of the mud flats of the River Deben up by Kyson Point on compulsory Sunday afternoon walks from The Abbey aren’t very favourable but hope at least that the author's Suffolk credentials have been established. I recently returned to the School for the first time since 1969 and found it much improved, both in its educational standards but more notably by the abundance of pretty women. It wasn’t like that in my day. Thank goodness!
I must also add that I had three uncles who farmed at Barton Mills, Tunstall, and Orford respectively. My paternal grandfather also farmed at Tunstall at the end of the runway of the former American Bentwaters Air Base and was also one of the last farmers in the county to utilize fulltime the noble Suffolk Punch.
I do hope you enjoy The Waiting Game. The driving and the writing totally dominated seven long years of my life and I trust you think that it was worth it in the end.
I am also pleased to announce that there will be a £100-00 reward to be funded personally by the author for the first reader to correctly identify the location of the semi-fictional Sutton Market on the OS map. Don’t rush in. It is not as obvious as it seems.
N.B. No Chartered Surveyors!
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