About me

"I’m Keith Eckstein (I'm the one on the left, by the way), although I write my motorbike fiction (as opposed to other things I work on) as Keith Michaels.

And this is my writing website.

I live near the small town of Sizun in the Finisterre region of North West Brittany and this page aims to tell you a bit about who I am and who I was before I saw the light and moved to Brittany."

After spending what seems to be a lifetime working in Corporate IT in London, I now find myself living in Brittany and, having spent most of years doing all sorts of jobs (including eight years working in the local abattoir,) I am now living and working on a farm that has horses.

When I am not working, I enjoy reading & writing (well, I’m not sure I enjoy the writing but I do it anyway!)

I realised, the other day, that I've now spent the last 23 years of my life living over here and...

I seem to have changed so much from the person I used to be.

Although I've done all sorts of things since I moved over here, I've now (as I've said) ended up living and working on a farm where we keep horses.

These days most of my friends have four legs and tend to shit in a field.

I do have normal friends as well, the human kind. I just don't ask them about their toilet habits.

Before...

I now seem to class my life as Before I moved to France and Since I moved to France.

Before I saw the light and jacked in a perfectly good well paid job, I used to be a typical young executive; lurching from one success or crisis to another at a high rate of knots - always determined to impress.

I remember, at one point, just before September 11, buying a motorbike. Just a little Suzuki 500, nothing to write home about but I thought that it would do me good to get back on the road. I sold it six months later without riding a single mile.

I was too busy doing things that, in retrospect, weren't so important after all.

And that really sums up my life in London...

Very busy, working hard at a job that really didn't matter at all.

Now

Now, my life is different. I live in the country and not the big city. The air tastes different; my water comes from a spring.

I live and eat according to the seasons, I count every centime that I spend. Sometimes I get wet; on a farm, if it rains, you can't take the day off - I worked Christmas Day last year, it snowed.

But I know my neighbours; I find time to stop and talk to them. In London I lived in a close in the part of the East End that we called Docklands. It sounded posher like that. There were about 60 houses in that close, maybe 200 people living in them. I knew only one of my neighbours by name, the woman who lived across the road from me; and I didn't know her well at all. Here I could probably tell you what each of my neighbours had for tea last night.

I don't watch TV any more; I can get a lifetime's worth of Eastenders just by going for a walk down the lane after work, watching the hares in the fields (I like hares, they're cool and they don't give a monkeys about anything) and seeing a deer or two (we have lots of deer here.)

And, maybe, meeting a neighbour and spending half an hour having a natter - generally about what we had for tea last night. No pressure to rush off to catch the tube to get home to finish a report and then drink myself into oblivion just so that I'd be fit for work the following day.

Horses

And then there's the horses.

I'm lucky enough to live and work on a farm where we keep horses.

Horses are alway happy to stop and have a chat. They never seem to need to rush off to catch the tube to get home to write a totally pointless report.

And, because they're slighlty reliant on me (moving them from field to field so that they have enough good grass to eat, taking them hay in the winter when there isn't any grass about) they seem to be grateful.

My ex-colleagues in London were also reliant on me and my team to keep their computers and servers running, they just never seemed to be grateful, they always wanted more and more.

And I was happy to deliver; to provide more and more until one day I woke up and realised how pointless it all was.

Don't get me wrong, the world needs global investment banks, I'm sure. It just doesn't need me to keep their computers running; someone else can have that job.

So, that's about it about me.

I'm sure that there's lots more that I could say but, to be honest, I'd rather say anything I've got to say in my stories.

There are times when I write (especially the Mike Kaminsky stories) when I think Gosh, that's getting a bit autobiographical..." but, in retrospect, I don't see anything wrong with that.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you've had a similar experience and want to have a chat, I'd love to hear from you - my email address is on the Contact page.

All the best

---

©2026 Copyright by Roadside-Tales.com - All rights reserved