Richard Feidler

I hurt my hearing.

I'm on hyper alert all the time.

I've learned to live with it.

But I've learned that if I feel like a man is threatening me, sometimes it triggers my trauma.

But sometimes I can just walk away or say expletives like I get angry.

So I'm not perfect.

But I have learnt that I've learnt how to look after myself.

Well, you know, after all of that, in my 50s, because I was always a runner before this even happened, I took up sport when I stopped smoking.

And I love, I've been an athlete ever since I was a kid, really.

But that was another thing that took me off that track, all the abuse that stopped.

So I took up long distance triathlon, Ironmans, done 10 of those.

I was doing athletics at international level for my age group.

And after 20 years of that, when I was 69, I went on a world travel trip and I went to Antarctica in 2019, just before COVID.

And

I had such a, dare I say, a spiritual experience.

Antarctica just blew my head away.

Well, I just felt this strong presence of, oh, I understand, not that I do because of the title of the book, but...

But I just felt a part of, in the most intense, magical way, seeing waves literally on top of a dead volcano, looking down at the ship, this pristine water, icebergs, penguins, and then these three whales just like 300 metres away started breaching.

And I just was in tears.

I just thought, oh, my God, this was magic.