Ian Walthew left school aged eighteen and spent six months walking across Spain, living as a tramp and following in the footsteps of the Cotswold writer Laurie Lee who wrote about his pre-civil war journey in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Ian eventually fell into the newspaper industry and ended his media career as worldwide Marketing Director on the executive board of the Paris-based newspaper The International Herald Tribune. After nearly a decade living and working abroad in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris and travelling the world he was thirty-four when he unexpectedly resigned and moved with his Australian wife to the Cotswolds.

After leaving the Cotswolds, Ian moved to Brussels, hoping to eventually find his place in the country. His first book, A Place in My Country, was written in Brussels.

Whether he continued to want to live in the countryside, or succeeded in doing so, is another story, but in the meantime he has had two more children, brothers to Annie.