Graeme Dinnen

Born to Clydeside engineers, stoic men who built empires for other people and were paid in exhaustion. I declined the inheritance.

They had spanners. I took spreadsheets, swapping oil and grit for the antiseptic gleam of Asian finance. In boardrooms, to the soft hiss of Bloomberg terminals, It took me a while to arrive at a powerful realisation - that we all want the same thing and it has very little to do with money.

I hadn't been playing the wrong game; I'd been playing the game wrong.

I stepped off the ladder before it finished leaning against the wrong wall. Wealth, I realised, isn’t made by labour but by position and the cleverest trick is not playing. I finally stopped pursuing castles in the air, those glittering fortresses built from ambition and postponed tomorrows.

The relentless chase for money had become a slow, impeccably mannered thief, quietly lifting the colour from my days while I applauded my own industry. Wealth, I discovered, is a splendid servant but an appalling master. Somewhere along the way I'd mistaken making a living for living at all, and the bill arrived not in pounds, but in moments I could never buy back.

What I value now isn’t that which I gained, but that which I avoided: the long, bruised dignity of people trapped in a rigged game.

Home became a movable feast: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Brunei. I travelled the world: hacking through Borneo jungles with the Punans, climbing several volcanoes in the Ring of Fire, sardine fishing with Portuguese fleets, riding with gauchos by the Magellan Straits, canoeing the lakes in Minnesota, and following in Wallace’s footsteps through the Spice Islands (now the Moluccas).

In April 2014, my wife Phylipa and I, with a flourish of recklessness, sold our house in Chichester and bought a pair of round-the-world air tickets to play a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-globe, to determine where we might plonk ourselves for the next decade.

Sri Lanka - steamy , fragrant, crowded…. Singapore - clean and orderly…. Bali - laid back, lulling, dangerously persuasive…. Australia - vast, beige, enthusiastic…. Chile - long, thin and entirely too much geography for one country.

Bali won. Of course it did. And it was our home for nearly 9 years,

Now retired in Cornwall, I write books about putting, spice routes, parasites, and the quiet, miraculous chemistry of time and natural health.