Beyond Inspiration With Nick Holme:
Walking 800km for Mental Health Awareness
1.NICK HOLME. TELL OUR READERS A LITTLE
ABOUT WHO YOU ARE, WHERE YOU ARE FROM, CHILDHOOD MEMORIES AND WHAT GENERALLY MAKES YOU TICK? This is actually quite a difficult question to answer! I know who I am, I know where I’m from and I have many childhood memories - most of them good and some of them less so, which I will try to explain here. My name is Nick Holme and I was born a week after man first landed on the Moon, during the height of the Cold War, in a landlocked country called Rhodesia, which is now modern day Zimbabwe in Southern Africa. At that time the world was locked in a struggle for dominance between ideologies of the so-called ‘East' and ‘West’; that is, Soviet and Chinese Communism versus the democratic agenda of the United States, Britain and Western Europe. Most ex-British and European colonies had won their independence by then and the whole world was a melting pot of political volatility. Superpower proxy wars were being fought around the globe, whilst the new nations were enjoying the fruits of their fledgling independence. Isn’t it sad that volatility persists and is still evident today; it appears that lessons which history could - and should - have taught us are not being learnt? Of course, as a child growing up in a country far away from the centre of superpower grandstanding, this all passed me by. However, we had our own problems to contend with, as the first 11 years of my life were mired in a civil war that claimed many lives and affected the whole population of the country and this has had a lasting effect on me and my outlook on life. A whole book could be written about it (and many already have been), so I will leave it where it is for another time, but I felt it was important to point out some of the background here.
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