Essays on Culture, Travel,
and the Ties That Bind Us

A Life Across Cultures, Markets and Countries

The Bard of Patagonia is a collection of reflections and essays on international travel, culture and politics, shaped by decades living and working across Latin America, Europe and beyond.

I have lived in Argentina for more than thirty years and spent much of my professional life working across Europe, Africa and Latin America as a marketeer, company founder and managing director, adviser, teacher and writer. Work, innate curiosity and a certain inability to remain in any given place for too long have taken me to more than eighty countries.

Along the way I have learned that language, culture and behaviour matter at least as much as economics in determining whether things work as intended. Policies are announced, markets react and institutions reorganise themselves, but outcomes are usually decided somewhere between a badly translated memo, an awkward dinner, an unspoken assumption or a joke that lands differently in another language.

Recent essays have explored subjects ranging from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Leicester City Football Club to football, politics and travel across several continents.

The Bard of Patagonia is an attempt to make sense of those encounters through essays on travel, politics, business, food, wine, football, literature and theatre, and the everyday rituals that reveal how societies actually function. If there is a unifying theme, it is that human beings remain stubbornly human wherever they happen to be — and that understanding this, rather than any particular technical model, is often what determines whether a project succeeds, a negotiation fails or a friendship survives. To paraphrase Tom Petty, we did it for the stories we can tell.