Bender Rules. This item is unavailable.Bender Rules

When I was a young man in the 1960s, the accepted route through life was - leave school, get a job, get married, have kids, and settle down to a life of hard slog with no end in sight until retirement at 65, by which time we’re too old to enjoy it anyway.

I was 19 when I realised this wasn’t for me and I decided I would try to live my life in reverse. I would “retire” now, while I was young enough to enjoy myself. Work would come later – in maybe thirty or forty years’ time.

This is the first part of my story – how I threw away the opportunity of a privileged education and a glittering career in accountancy and opted instead to bum my way around Europe for a few years until finally settling in the Algarve, where I had a stroke of good fortune, became emotionally attached to a local street dog – that’s him in the title of this book – and fell in love with the country and its people.