Alastair Ashford-Brown (Lala) grew up in Wiltshire on the edge of Salisbury Plain and attended the prestigious public school Marlborough College, from which he was expelled for cutting the rope of the school bell, after which his real schooling began as he set off on the road to seek romance and adventure.

Hedges Ditches and Dreams recounts some of these adventures: how he learnt to survive on his wits, his meeting with Gypsies in the vineyards of France and his subsequent departure with them to live in their great encampment in the Pyrenees, clinging on to the outside of a train from Paris to Lisbon in pursuit of the lady of his dreams, shipwreck on the Baltic, imprisonment in a Greek jail, and encounters with some of the picaresque characters he met on his way. It tells the compelling story of a turbulent youth, of drunken escapades and passionate love affairs, evoking a Europe of traditional rural life and Bohemian cities in a world which has now largely disappeared.

Alastair Ashford-Brown is the author of Hedges, Ditches and Dreams and two books of poetry: Songs of Sorrow and Joy and Nets in the Wind.