Тема: Гостиная Алана Ваттса
СООБЩЕНИЕ ОТ АВТОРА "ПРОГНОЗ ПОГОДЫ ЗДЕСЬ И СЕЙЧАС"
It is very gratifying to hear from you about publishing one of my books in Russian, as I have never, in all my long writing career, had any contact with anyone from Russia. I am very glad this situation is now changing. We need this kind of inter-change to break down barriers. In the past we have heard too much in this country about Commissars and not half enough about everyone else.
I was born in a little village called Southbourne about six miles west of the City of Chichester (on the South Coast of England) where I went to school and, in 1940, started work as an apprentice electrician.
The Scout Movement has been a great influence on my life because in 1937 I joined the Southbourne Sea Scouts. This meant that I was destined for the Navy and eventually, in 1943, I was accepted into the Service for eventual Officer training. However it was 1945 before I actually achieved that goal. My war-time service was on Motor Torpedo Boats and then, as a Sub Lieutenant on minesweepers.
I always had a desire to teach and so (when I was demobilised) applied to a Teacher Training College but they turned me down. This was a blow to my pride so I used what little money I had to go back to "school" and eventually got a Mathematics and Physics Degree from London University.
This qualification meant that I could turn my great interest in weather into a job and so became a Weather Forecaster in the Meteorological Office. I had already built-up a good knowledge of weather from training my Senior Scouts to pass their Weatherman's Badge, and I really enjoyed my new job.
However I found the night-duties irksome and so, after a few years, took a post with The General Electric Company solving problems with cooling the new semiconductor diodes that they were producing for powering electric trains.
Here I met my future wife, Joyce,who was Personal Assistant to the Head of the Cathode-Ray Tube section. We got married one Saturday, had a week's yachting honeymon and I started in the teaching job I had always wanted the following Monday morning.
This meant a move to the ancient town of Colchester in Essex (fifty miles northeast of London) and I taught scientific subjects there for over thirty years, acquiring a daughter Christine along the way.
I had learned how to sail in the Scouts and, having borrowed the money off an aunt, bought myself a high-performance sailing dinghy. The Met. Office had kindly posted me to the air-base at Thorney Island (which I could see from my back-bedroom window at home) and the air bases' wind instruments gave me the material to write a research paper into seabreezes. I wrote a dinghy-sailor's version for Yachting World and went on to write regularly (and internationally) for the yachting press.
It seemed a good idea to turn my yachting articles into a book which I called Wind and Sailing Boats that was very well received in the United States. My publisher was the famous deep-sea yachtsman K. Adlard Coles and through him I wrote Weather Forecasting Ashore and Afloat and then ( for him and various International publishers) a string of weather books for yachtsmen and the public generally.
However the book which has spanned all of this time and has run into a large number of editions is Instant Weather Forecasting which has been in continuous production since its launch in 1967 and has had some twelve or more foreign language editions and I am glad it has been printed in Russian too now.
Yours sincerely
Alan (Watts)
7 - копия.jpg 572.11 kb, 371 downloads since 2013-06-13
