A long way round

Where I live

I live in Madagascar with my wife. That is not a sabbatical or a stopover; it is home, and it followed a lifetime of moving around Europe and a good deal of the rest of the world.

Practically, it means I work on GMT+3. I am three hours ahead of London and one ahead of Malta, so a European working day is covered from the start of it rather than the middle. I have never found the distance to be the hard part of remote work. Overlap is the hard part, and GMT+3 solves it.

I am a British citizen and I hold a British passport, which matters more than it should in this industry: it makes Gibraltar straightforward and most of Europe workable.

Before the grown-up world

I started in motorsport, and for a long stretch that meant Formula One. I was National Racing Editor at Motorsport News and Autosport, then editor of F1i.com, which I took from nothing to a million users a month and one of the largest independent sites in the sport. Paddocks, deadlines measured in minutes, and a readership that knows more than you do about the one thing you got wrong.

From there I spent twelve years as European Editor for Motor Trend and European Car, which mostly meant being handed the keys to cars worth more than a house and being asked to have an opinion by Thursday. I wrote features for The Sunday Times, MSN and Tatler alongside it.

It was a wonderful job and it taught me something I have used ever since: enthusiasm is not the same as authority. The pieces that lasted were the ones where I had actually done the work.

And then the grown-up world

Cars gave way to technology, then crypto, then firearms, then gambling. Somewhere in that run the work changed shape. I stopped being the person who writes the piece and became the person who decides what the standard is, then builds the thing that enforces it.

Regulated markets are where that matters most. In gambling the cost of publishing the wrong sentence is not a correction, it is a fine, a licence condition, or a client relationship. So the standard cannot live in a style guide that nobody reads. It has to live in the pipeline: validation gates, jurisdictional rules and compliance checks that run before anything reaches the CMS, not after a regulator finds it.

That is the work now. Editorial judgement, compliance literacy and the engineering to make both repeatable. It is a smaller room than it should be, and it is the reason the earlier career still counts: I am not an AI enthusiast who found content, and I am not an editor who is wary of the tooling. I have been doing the first job for nearly three decades and building the second for the last few years.

I still get on a plane

Remote is where I live, not a limit on what I take on. I travel to clients for short-term contracts, typically one to three months on site. Market launches, platform migrations, post-acquisition integration and compliance remediation are exactly the shape of work that needs someone in the building for a while and then does not need them at all.

Malta, Gibraltar and London are the obvious ones, and I have spent enough of my life in airports for it to be an unremarkable part of the job. If the engagement warrants it, I am there.

The whole run