Neil Humphreys' Biography

Neil Humphreys grew up on the world’s biggest council estate in Dagenham, England. When he told a couple of university lecturers, they actually took a couple of steps back and handed over their wallets. His mum threw him into the Parsloes Primary School nursery and ordered him to fit in, so he took all his clothes off and asked to ride the rocking horse. When they told him to strip for P.E., he didn’t realise the underpants stayed on. They never did at home.

At 11, he joined the local football team, Barking Juniors FC, and played in goal because he wasn’t good enough to play anywhere else. He wasn’t that good in goal either and his manager spent the next three years trying to replace him. Neil moved on to Mayesbrook Comprehensive School, which considered itself one of the better schools in Dagenham because it had a really good basketball team.

Neil was tall. Neil never made the basketball team. He was immediately christened a “boff” by chav-prototypes because he knew his nine times table and the name stuck until he got his GCSE results and it was changed to “lucky bastard”. The highlights of his secondary school career included kissing a popular girl for seven minutes without breathing, scoring against the Teachers XI and coming 13th in the annual cross-country run at Goresbrook Park. Several younger girls finished in the top 10.

His A-Level results made him a big fish in a puddle at Mayesbrook (now renamed the more hip Sydney Russell, though Neil will one day launch a campaign to change it to the Dudley Moore Comprehensive School). At Manchester University, his results made him distinctly ordinary. Destitute, average and sporting an awful bowl haircut in a failed attempt to look like Blur’s Damon Albarn, Neil pulled his socks up and left with a first class degree in history and a couple of prizes: one for the highest degree awarded, the other for the worst haircut.

After six months at a stockbrokers pretending to be a poor man’s Nick Leeson (Neil did manage to lose over a thousand pounds in one day), he got the itch to travel with his best mate Scott in 1996. Their old Singaporean mate Dave suggested Singapore because it promised a warm climate and free accommodation. They immediately agreed, keen to visit China. It took several minutes before they realised Singapore was not in China. It took them several minutes to find Singapore on a map. Neil found work as a speech and drama teacher and later joined the Straits Times as a sports reporter. His class sizes were around 25. Fewer people read his S-League reports on Tanjong Pagar United’s latest victory.

Eager for a wider audience and inspired by Bill Bryson, he wrote Notes From An Even Smaller Island (Singapore through a young Brit’s eyes) in 2001. The book sold and, strangely, still sells to this day.  TODAY newspaper asked Neil to write a funny column every week and he eventually cobbled all the columns together and published Scribbles From the Same Island and his mother again bought enough to make it one of the best-selling books of 2003. After a decade in a wonderful island, he decided to travel around a marginally bigger island and picked Australia. Singapore had better food; Australia had better marsupials. There’s always a trade off. Wanting to leave on a high and with a George Lucas-like trilogy to his name, Neil wrote Final Notes From A Great Island: A Farewell Tour of Singapore; his favourite book of the three.

In Australia, Neil now writes more for Singapore than he did when he was actually living there. His Straits Times columns in Sports and Life! remain popular and Singaporeans write to him claiming he still lives in Singapore. Sometimes he has to look out of the window to check.

Neil now resides in Geelong, a quiet seaside town south of Melbourne, and divides his time writing for Asian and Australian publications, including The Age, Arena and the Big Issue. In 2007, Complete Notes From Singapore was released. In 2008, his first three books were re-released across South-east Asia and also in Australia and the UK. Neil is now in talks to adapt his Singapore books into a movie and is currently working on the screenplay and trying to find a 70-year-old Indian actress willing to get her boobs out on the silver screen.