Kudpung is the name of a village in Isan, Northeastern Thailand.
It also the main home of this contributor to the Misplaced Pages, a semi-retired British academic who was born and raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, England, in 1949.
My father was one of the boffins who who contributed to the development of Radar during WWII. I left England in my early 20s after taking a first degree in Business Studies to spend six years in Lower Saxony with BAOR, followed by a further nine years in West Berlin where I studied Applied Linguistics, Communication Science (media), language pedagogics, and Applied Foreign Languages. I play the piano, the organ, the drums, and the vibraphone and while in Berlin I specialised in jazz and toured much of Europe with bebob and fusion bands. For a short while In the early 1980s I presented a daily programme on a Spanish radio station.
In 1988 following several years of involvement with the Avignon Festival, I moved permanently to the Provence where I taught languages and marketing in a regional university, and developed media and marketing solutions for Rhône wine, while producing a few acres of Grenache for the Lirac AOC.
In 2000 I settled in Thailand where I ended up teaching in a public university in Bangkok, designing teacher training programmes for the The Ministry of Education, and finally developing the languages department of a teacher training facility for a large group of independent schools, and collaborating on the development of new Cambridge University ESOL exams. Over the years, I have published a lot of stuff on linguistics and travel, and a series of English language text books (2004) specifically for use in Southeast Asia.
I retired from academic work in 2008 to my Thai home in Kudpung where I occupy my time with translating, writing, composing, and running a small consultancy. I return to Malvern regularly. My daughter by a previous marriage is a chair professor in a French university.
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