Executive Dreams

John Cowan is Group Sales Director of Scottish Amicable Life PLC, a company he joined some 30 years ago. He spends most of his time in London, where he sits on the same Board as Sir Peter Davis of Prudential (soon to be Sainsbury's) but returns regularly to his flat in Glasgow.

I LOVE the business environment, with its constant demands and its competitiveness. I've been a sales person all of my working life and, although I get great satisfaction from sitting at the board table developing strategy and policy, I've never lost the thrill of leading my teams to new business wins.

There are two other great loves in my life: books and travel. My late father, a former professional footballer and Eighth Army veteran, fired my imagination with his tales of travel and new experiences in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere In 1959, while we still lived in the Gorbals in Glasgow, he took the family on a long trip to Spain.

For someone from my background that was then a relatively unusual experience but it fired my imagination for travel and still does.

Just last year, for example, when I was in Laos, North Thailand and near the Burmese border, where the magnificent Mekong River flows through the Golden Triangle. Next month there is a business trip to Atlanta in the United States and in May I am off to Vietnam to visit Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Hue.

My dreams lie then in a world of travel where I drink with the locals, jot down my observations and indulge my equal passion for books by trekking the world's back streets for out-of-print First Editions.

I began collecting modern First Editions some years ago and managed to get hold of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Graham Greene's The Quiet American and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and the much earlier Riddle of The Sands by Erskine Childers.

Then I discovered that finding and collecting became compulsive. I've bought every First Edition of John McGahern, Brian Moore and Colm Toibin. The range then goes on to Iain Banks and Ian McEwan, to old editions of the Left Book Club, including George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier.

Signed copies are particularly sought after and I seem to have developed a happy knack of picking up copies at publication, such as Anthony Bevor's Stalingrad, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Thomas Kenneally's Schindler's Ark and Ronal Bennett's The Catastrophist. The most stunning book which I've bought in recent years, unsigned, regrettably, was Bernhard Schlink's The Reader.

From time to time I buy, and of course, read poetry. I like McNiece and McGough, though my favourite is Seamus Heaney, whom I've enjoyed for 20 years and who is now, happily, so widely recognised as a major figure.

I've no intention of relinquishing business life for the time being, but when I cash in my entitlements, I'll hit the road to discover as much more of the world as I can.

I'd like also to maybe do a bit of dealing in the First Editions market and, no surprise this, start shaping my first book, probably fiction or travel.

Some day, I know, I'll sit in my flat in London or Glasgow amongst all my books, and begin to type up the first page of the Cowan opus, or maybe I'll give it just one more trip before I start.

John Cowan was speaking to Drew Johnston

Copyright 2000
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