Life – A Puzzle to Be Solved? | Austin Macauley Publishers

Have you ever been perplexed or disappointed with life? This book will provide you with many opportunities to ‘set a different course’ for yourself. Mike uses his stories in magical ways, which quickly focus your attention on the characters and their vagaries. Through them, he reveals both the conscious and unconscious ways we employ to reach decisions that will affect our route through the ‘maze’ of our existence. You may recognise yourself ‘here and there’.

When Mike Joslin was in his teens, he used to dream about growing up and living his life performing various jobs. He imagined working as a sheep drover in Australia, waiter, long-distance lorry driver and numerous other temporary occupations, each one lasting about six weeks.

Naturally, these objectives faded into obscurity to be replaced by more sensible aims but the underlying urge for change maintained itself since he was employed in a variety of positions during the course of his working life. Including brief jobs, these totalled about 17.

After matriculating at grammar school, he attended night school, studying chemistry for four years whilst working in research for the National Coal Board.

Reasons for moving on varied between desire and necessity but boredom and being told what to do by those superiors he considered incompetent were constant spurs to change again and again. He spent the last 25 years of his working life self-employed in Dorset, where he started his own water treatment company.

In the 1990s, Mike obtained granted patents for several water treatment inventions which were entirely environment-friendly, replacing chemicals in protecting equipment from corrosion and scaling. He formed a limited company which successfully marketed the resultant devices all over the world. The company was sold in 2005 to a Canadian group.

Mike has played a number of sports during his later years, becoming quite proficient at golf, and represented the county at senior level. He was the over-70s champion for three successive years.

He is married with three grown-up children and three grandchildren. He and his wife help look after the two youngest ones, COVID-19 permitting!

Mike has previously published a smaller book of short stories called, Fragments of Reality in 2012 and in 2018 published his challenge to the Big Bang Theory entitled E=mc² Unravelled: An Alternative View of the Cosmos. He is keenly interested in philosophy and has written several theses of his own.

He has always supported the underdogs of life and regularly fights their cause in the ‘Letters’ section of the local paper.