#spotlight & #Excerpt Gerard Philey’s Euro-Diary: Quest for a Life

August 26, 2022 Fee Rachel's Random Resources

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#Spotlight & #Excerpt Gerard Philey’s Euro-Diary: Quest for a Life by Brendan James
@Brendan23015569

Gerard Philey’s Euro-Diary: Quest for a Life
by Brendan James

‘Could there be a world of interest and adventure beyond the Midlands? A world of confidence, sex and excitement? A better life – a better me?’ These are the questions Gerard Philey grapples with over New Year, 1995. Sitting in his rented Black Country room, reflecting on his thankless teaching job and miserable love life, he courageously decides to abandon his humdrum existence and embark on a quest for Euro-fulfilment, fun and fitness on the Continent.

After a shaky start in Brussels, events manoeuvre him to Amsterdam where chance encounters shift his world well and truly into fifth gear. He samples the trials and tribulations of new relationships, alongside managing a sex shop in the city’s Red Light Area – on top of the challenges of fat-free living and international travel!

Through his bittersweet diary, we see how Gerard steers a laugh-out-loud course through farcical episodes and fanciful characters…and how entanglements from past and present draw him unwittingly into a criminal underworld where events ultimately take their toll.

Purchase Link –
https://amzn.to/3spEKZ9

EXCERPT

This extract is taken from the very start of the book and features the opening entry from Gerard’s diary. It reveals his disenchantment with his job, love life, and indeed, his life in general. And as such, we see his reasons for abandoning his current existence and his desire to embark on a quest for a self-reinvention.

Monday 1st January – Walsall

January 1st again, and same New Year’s Day feeling when I woke up this morning: relief that last year is exactly that, followed by sense of dread about the year ahead. Sat on the side of the bed for a minute, staring at the stains on the carpet which started blurring as last year’s ‘highlights’ whirled around inside my head: endless days of tedium, teaching French and German to kids whose mission in life is to flick me red raw with bits of chewed up Paris Match; endless nights of marking ungrammatical sentences about guinea pigs and ‘mon boy band favori’. The summer hols in Skegness offered some relief, until I slipped on a discarded cheeseburger and apparently created the most hilarious case of groin-strain ever witnessed by Lincolnshire locals. Could just about walk again in time for the September OFSTED visit, on the first day of which the head of languages decides to have a nervous breakdown… Which slowly brings me to Christmas, the season of good will to all men, which Tina, my girlfriend of eighteen months, obviously thinks is code for ‘dump Gerard’.

Then I remembered and smiled to myself, as the stains came back into focus. I don’t have to look at them any more! It’s Bye Bye Black Country Day minus one, and there’s absolutely nothing to stop me. I’m twenty-five, with no wife, no girlfriend any more, not even a guinea pig, and a rented room in a house I share with Jan and Phil, whose baby will be terrorising my only peace at night from February… It’s nearly time for me, Gerard Philey, to go out and get a life. There must be more than what these last few years have offered. I can become Signor Cosmopolitano – surely. Saw a JFK quote in the paper last week:

“You cannot become what you want to be by remaining what you are”.

Spot on. Enough of break-time what-ifs, bus stop musings and bed-time wondering. Am determined this year’s diary will not make as depressing (and boring) reading as last year’s. There’s a big continent out there, and I’m more than ready for it.

Author Bio –
Brendan James is the author of the new comedy novel, “Gerard Philey’s Euro-Diary: Quest for a Life”. Though this is his first novel, he has a large number of non-fiction publications (under the name Brendan Bartram) as a former university lecturer and researcher. A passionate linguist and Europhile, he spent a number of years working in the Netherlands, France and Germany. He lives in the West Midlands with his husband.