Alastair ('Lala') Ashford-Brown was born in 1953 in the heart of rural Wiltshire. He attended Marlborough College, one of England's top schools, from which he was expelled for cutting down the school bells celebrated by Poet Laureate John Betjeman. After a brief period as a shepherd on Exmoor where he had his heart broken for the first time, Lala set out to seek solace on the roads of Europe where he wandered for nearly twenty years in the pursuit of meaning and the magic he felt to have vanished from life and above all to find romance and adventure, both of which he found along with much despair. He travelled with the Gypsies and lived with them in their great encampment in the Pyrenees. He drank, he fell in love, he lived on his wits and broke the law and was imprisoned in his beloved Greece, where he started to write his story: Hedges, Ditches and Dreams (Tales from the Flames of Youth). The poems in this volume are those he wrung from his blood over the years.