Jesus In My Corner

Jesus in My Corner, written by Andy Flute, chronicles his struggle to overcome a myriad of life-long challenges with violence and alcohol. For over 30 years, violence and alcohol were Andy's daily bread until, one day, by the power of prayer, he managed to achieve what no amount of alcohol or prison incarceration could ever achieve. When he was at the point of death, intoxicated with alcohol following a ten-day binging session, I went to see my old mate and prayed for him with Pastor Steve.

Andy was fighting the demon of alcohol and he was on the ropes, down for the count. Andy, a former captain of the English boxing team and British Middleweight title challenger alongside sparring partner Chris Eubank and other world class fighters, knew what brutal fighting was all about. This fight was different, one he couldn't win on his own strength. Andy felt the intense grip and destructive downward spiral alcohol had on his life. Battered and bleeding, with no more strength, he cried out to Jesus.

In a truly miraculous turnaround, Andy found Jesus in his corner and almost instantaneously gave up alcohol. During the bleakest of moments, he experienced a spiritual awakening. Slowly, he found his way through darkest era of his life. He came to believe a power greater than himself in Jesus.

Now with Jesus in his corner, Andy is an active member of Sedgley Community Church. The Bible employs the analogy of wrestling in reference to our warfare with Satan and his hosts. Andy had a fight that only Jesus could referee, this gigantic battle played out until he was baptised in water.

Andy Flute's willingness to share the most intimate aspects of his life was born out of a deep desire to help others addicted to alcohol and violence.
Despite these daunting events, Andy now works hard to live a normal life and raise a family of his own. He regularly attends prison workshops and shares his testimony in local schools. The Lord has made an amazing transformation in his life, He could do the same for you!

His good friend, John Cramphorn

Juggling Cats

This is a true story about a family whose lives were upturned on a fateful Spring day. The story of how their lives changed, and how they coped with the stress of having a family member murdered in cold blood. How was this allowed to happen? How are families allowed to be left with next to no resolution and hounded by press and government officials, then unceremoniously dumped and then ignored following life changing incidents. Will they ever find out any answers? 2014 was a year they would never forget, a year that would change the direction of their lives forever.

Life After Reconstruction

Life After Reconstruction is my story after genital reconstructive surgery. It follows the events of what happened in my life after I wrote my first book, Wings for the Butterfly, published in Germany and in Poland. After the book came out, I thought I would be famous on the spot. Instead, I ended up in a worse situation than I was in; from living in my own flat to being in a refugee home. In the refugee home, which was not supportive for the process of sexual healing after reconstruction, I met up with other forms of traumas, perhaps worse than my own. The result of the hostile environment in the refugee home was the tension that heightened the already frightened sexual restoration, leading to numbness once again and even more rage which eventually became uncontrollable. In order to understand myself better, I became involved with trying to understand the people I came to live with, trying to understand their problems, to the point of understanding that we are all looking for pure love that was denied to us in the formative years.

Lighthouse Stories

Lighthouses remain a fascination to most people. The light beam still flashes a warning to all shipping and acts as a guide to safe harbour in rough weather, but unfortunately the lighthouse keepers are now a thing of the past. Modern technology has meant that satellite navigation where signals can be bounced off satellites to turn engines on and off and fog signals can be operated from ashore without the trusty keepers. The lights still twinkle and backup systems ensure ships still have guidance to safety. No keepers, alas: they have all been made redundant. The way of life of the lighthouse keeper is now well past.
The reader of my stories should gain an insight into what being a keeper was all about. The working details provide a fair look at what makes a lighthouse function. The short stories cover a wide variety of different locations including the Channel Islands. Characters within the service are as varied as the lighthouse but there is always a story to tell given the nature of the work and the importance of safety at sea for shipping. As always, it’s the sea that is the master in everything that happens but humour keeps rearing its head to remind us of the simple things in life; it constantly raises a smile.
Although lighthouses are now unmanned, the public is still curious about their history and what a keeper's life was all about. This book and its stories perhaps can give an insight into a time when keepers were essential to safe passage.

Lord of the Dead

In an age where the story of murder is told of perpetrators who are generally behind bars, by the families of the victims of crime, or by the authorities who have prosecuted killers, here is a story told from a different perspective. This is the story of Nicolas Claux, a self-confessed Vampire and Cannibal who, having been convicted of murder in the 1990’s in France, and has since been subsequently released from prison. This is the story of his life, from his own words and detailed recollections, told in a manner unlike any other. This is an insight into the life and mind of a killer.

Love Is Blind: A Life with Horses

This is the journey of one woman’s life with horses. Catherine is a Romani woman, a Gypsy, and recognised her first horses around the age of two and now at seventy, she still has horses in her life. One of those horses is Samio, her big blind 18-hand Clydesdale. Catherine has, she thinks, just stopped rescuing horses; seven still share her life. Although she no longer rides, she still drives horses and her passion and love has never wavered. Having broken her neck and back in a horse accident at 16, she was told she would never ride again. It took her two years to walk and five years before she went back in the saddle but never again to ride wild or jump. Catherine lived on the road for the first 11 years of her life. There are some 25,000 Romani in Australia but to her knowledge, she is the only Gypsy who still travels in the bow top caravan, the vardo. No longer on the road full-time, she tries to travel when she can; always speaking for the animals of Earth. This is a book of love and passion for the horse, told by a storyteller who lives the story and walks her talk with laughter as she says, “Shit happens, just empty out your suitcases and plant flowers in the compost.” After a brain tumour and radiation, nothing seems to stop her and her love and activism for the animals of Earth – especially the horse and dog – shines bright and her enthusiasm for life and rescuing animals keeps her fit and healthy. Hers is a remarkable story.

Lucky Dip

After an improbable beginning, Richard Thomas’s diplomatic career took him to some unlikely places, like Bhutan where his motor-scooter spawned an aid programme, or twenty thousand feet up in Robert Maxwell’s private jet buying up post-communist Bulgaria, or a NATO base in the North Atlantic to await the arrival of Satan, or to tea round the fire in Downing Street with a government minister and a mounted policeman, or to a wooden hut in West Africa where he, now persona non grata, and his Australian girlfriend, Catherine, managed to get married on the fringes of a dictator’s last-gasp political rally.

But it was not all beer and skittles. There were run-ins with secret policemen in communist Eastern Europe, encounters with horrific conditions in post-communist so-called orphanages where Catherine kick-started a new, humane approach to physical and cognitive disability in children and adults, deliberate cultivation of the dissidents who would supplant a communist dictatorship and a close-up view of Europe’s biggest displacement of people since the Second World War, the result of Bulgaria’s ethnic cleansing of a tenth of its own population in 1989 barely noticed by western governments or media.

All this, and much more, is recounted by someone who reckons that he struck lucky in the diplomatic dip.

Margaret: Daughter of Destiny

“The damage done tonight will resound down the generations!”

These words, spoken in anger by an outraged mother in the year 1904, will prove prophetic. Fourteen years later, a child enters the world, innocent, yet blighted by the repercussions of a distant crime, committed on a summer night, in remote Western Australia. From the beginning, the odds are stacked against Margaret as she is robbed of her childhood.

In due course, Margaret reaches adulthood and to her horror, finds herself powerless to prevent the outcome she most dreads. The malevolent forces of destiny reach down to a further generation and into the lives of her children.

This story is a tribute to the courage and tenacity of a mother’s love. It plays out against the backdrop of a period spanning two world wars, a great depression and the dawn of a new millenium. Through all of this, Margaret faces the additional challenges of being a single mother in an unforgiving era.

The story follows the relentless power of generational forces, pitted against the strength of the human spirit. It relives one woman’s heroic struggle to change the future. Margaret forges a path – ultimately – to release and redemption.

Margaret’s story is told by the person who shared so closely in this journey of struggle and redemption: her daughter.

Moonlight and Roses

The year is 1934 and Albert, a singer, meets Dorothy, a pianist, because another pianist has broken his thumb. As children they had grown up during the First World War and had known the Depression, but they were young and life was full of music. They married in 1936 and their daughter, Barbara, was born in 1937. Life looked good but Albert was an Army reservist and was called up at the outbreak of the Second World War. His letters to Dorothy from France form the basis of this book. Fortunately, he survived Dunkirk and was posted to Stars in Battledress, entertaining the troops for the duration of the war.

The book shows the privations on the Home Front and the morale of the British people despite the dangers and hardships of war. Life was no easier after the war, but with the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the New Look, colour came back into everyone's life. The Festival of Britain in 1951 was the icing on the cake. And with the National Health Service being created and new homes being built, the dark days were past and life could only get better.

More in Hope Than Glory

Football is a game that is loved throughout the world at every level. It’s a game that is all-encompassing whether it be the enjoyment of a kick about in the local park or the magnificent spectacle of a World Cup final. Well, this is a football story that lies somewhere between those two extremes, and to be honest more towards the bottom end of the spectrum.

This is a light-hearted true story of a young lad who used to walk four miles to the ground of the team he loved for every home game, and then grew up to become its chairman. It tells of the many highs and even more lows of running a lower league football club. It recounts the hopes and aspirations of every football supporter, followed by the inevitable kick-in-the-stomach feeling when it all falls down. It’s about love and passion for football in a proud northern town.

More in Hope Than Glory is the story of how what was once regarded as one of the most unsuccessful league football teams suddenly and dramatically became a little less unsuccessful.

Otto Papesch

Otto Papesch was my father. I was four years old when he died. I asked myself for years what kind of a human being he was. I have attempted to paint a picture of that handsome, charismatic, cultivated, professional chemical engineer, enthusiastic sportsman, photographer and family man by basing myself on the vast correspondence that still exists, his diary of 1917, stories about him from my mother and grandparents and the innumerable photos he took over the years. This has been an attempt to describe his prominent characteristics but also shed light on his dilemmas and the contradictions in his personality and thereby to describe the important events of his short life. Would his destiny have been different had he been born a year later?

Our Mothers

This book contains a collection of stories written by a group of friends who met during school and university days. Rarely celebrated, these short stories are about their mothers. While these women were from different backgrounds and some were born, or lived their early lives, in different countries, they shared some things in common. They were British by either birth or ancestry. They were middle class and they were young mothers during the latter part of World War 2, or shortly thereafter. They lived in Canberra during the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s – longer in some cases – and contributed to the social life of the growing city in a variety of ways.