Who am I and what am I up to?

My old school (and it's a very old school, dating to 1552) has taken to the interweb in a big way, mostly - I assume - to beg for money from those former pupils who have any. Ha! Fooled them!

Anyway, they ask what we've been up to. My former classmates seem largely to be (predictably) a bunch of accountants, finance professionals, civil servants and the like. One's a hedge fund millionaire, one (interestingly - and a nice bloke) is working on creating a museum for the Parachute Regt, one (interestingly, if tragically) died on the way down from the summit of Everest in 1995.

(Other old boys, from other years since 1552 include JRR Tolkien, the painter Burne-Jones, Bill Slim - the best allied general of WWII bar none - the comedian/naturalist/TV personality Bill Oddie and airport novelist supreme Lee Child)

Here's what I claim to have done this year:

This year Howard Whitehouse (1976) has helped dig out a bus from an Andean streambed at 17,000 feet, been stung in the ear by wasps, and written a novel involving quite a lot of zombies. His “Mad Misadventures” series of books for discerning young persons has been sold to a publisher in Belgrade for translation into Serbo-Croat. His luggage was searched in El Salvador. He performed a self-penned song about a courgette in a contest for zucchini-oriented poetry, and came second in a field of two. He has refused to eat deep-fried guinea pig, and thinks you should too.

Every bit of this is true.