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Gerald Hogg was born in Bedford in the South of England. At the age of 4 his family moved to Jamaica where his dad had been transferred from London to work in Kingston to work as a foreman scaffolder. It was there, his love affair with island life began. A few years later when they moved back to the UK, they moved to his father’s hometown of Middlesbrough in northeast England. Gerald says, they went from living like royalty on sundrenched islands surrounded by palm trees, clear blue seas and golden beaches to living in impoverished conditions in a cold northern town with steelworks and two chemical plants polluting the air with noxious gasses. Never much of a scholar, Gerald explained the only subjects he excelled at were sports and geography. When he left school early at the age of 15, with 5 other schoolmates, their science teacher said they would “never amount to anything and would all end up as drunks, unemployed, or in prison.” That made him more determined to get away from England and start a new life in the tropics. The teacher's words stayed with Gerald and they have given him the strength to prove him wrong. Since that day he has worked as a chef on cruise ships, five star hotels, and restaurants around the world, been to the antarctic, lived in 10 different countries, owned a successful advertising business in Australia, a beautiful house on Australia's Gold Coast, and a commercial sailboat in the Philippines, and he now lives now lives in Hua Hin Thailand where he has reinvented himself from a chef to an author and so far he has written 14 books. His biography is “You Will Never Amount to Anything.” Being a glutton for punishment, three years ago he started a YouTube channel about living in Thailand called “Thailand My Land…Retiring Disgracefully.” One of Gregg’s latest books is titled “The Eight Best Retirement Locations in Thailand: Chiang Mai, Koh Samui, Bangkok, Phuket, Hua Hin, Krabi, Chiang Rai, and Pattaya.” Gerald retired to Thailand in 2017 from Australia where he spent a good deal of his life having moved there in 1974.
