Phil found himself living in Cornwall surrounded by mines and a wonderful coastline. He inherited his father's love of nature and has a native curiousity about everything around him. Making sense of all of the rocks, in what the Cornish call hedges, became a source of interest. Redruth, like the Coromandels in New Zealand, was full of mining history and progression from school to the Camborne School of Mines to study mining was an easy progression, even though he finally ended up working with computers supporting research work and later business systems. His travels took his family from the UK to New Zealand via South Africa and the then Rhodesia through its war years to Zimbabwe.