When I was 12, I walked from Durban to Lourenco Marques with my elder brother, Neville, and my father. It took us two weeks to complete the 372 miles, sleeping mostly on the side of the road, often walking from before dawn until after sundown.

The journey changed my life in ways incalculable at the time.

I wrote about this trip in "A Walk to Lourenco Marques: Reminiscences of a 12-Year-Old", and dedicated it to my father. Our bicycle ride to Beira emerged out of our walk to Lourenco Marques

Roald Dahl, in a postscript to Danny, the Champion of the World, said that father's should be "sparky".

"A message to children who have read this book—When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: a stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is sparky". (Roald Dahl)

And Danny, in a way, is more a story about how a single father brought up his son, defying convention and authority, making young Danny feel like a champion, than it is a story about a boy.

In this book, I want to share about how my father, through the adventures he took us on, moulded the lives of my brother and me and, in so doing, sowed in me the seeds of how I would later live my life and bring up my own children—for the better, I believe.

And if there is a father (or mother) out there who listens to this book and decides to be more "sparky" because of it, I will have achieved my purpose.