the play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King

Any one who reads this blog will have noticed that a number of posts were recently  removed. This was because my previous employers were concerned about them. In this current era of the Levenson enquiry and the debate over freedom of speech it may be some what ironic that rather than investigate the comments posted ( backed up as you may recall by photographic evidence) it was preferred that they were removed.  It was perhaps a good thing that I left when I did because the publication of my next novel draws near. I wrote this novel before I started working for them though I was working on their assets in West Africa ( as a freelance sub contractor of a subcontractor) at the time and as the novel deals with corruption in the oil industry, and I must stress it is a NOVEL, that is fiction and as in all the movies I will stress that none of the characters are meant in any way to resemble real or living characters, but it was inspired and coloured by my observations working in Africa and the Middle east in the oil industry, any way I don't think they  would have liked it, if this blog was enough to cause waves the publication of the book would have caused a tsunami.


I hope they enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Of course none of it is true, and that is a small fact  that may comfort them these things could not possibly happen, not in the highly regulated industry in which we work, with ethics departments, accountability traceability and all those other buzz words with which they ( the industry ) pepper their platitudes, but a large part of the novel concerns the kidnapping of a group of oil workers in West Africa and postulates the, of course, entirely fictional machinery behind that kidnapping and looks into the areas of who really benefited and who really orchestrated it. But it is, as I must repeat, fiction. Though I was actually kidnapped, and this is  matter of public record, and the AK 47s had real bullets in them and they  militants were well funded which i s also well established nothing else should be inferred from the novel.

Astute readers  or those who know me we'll may recal that my masters degree was writen about Hamlet, and  it s from that work that I took the title of this post;

the play's the thing

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King