Out & About

This illustrated book traces the lives and times of two generations of an elephant couple that leave their herd communities in Africa, emigrate to London and then, as their family grows and flourishes, live and work in in many countries.

A trilogy of pictures illustrating the rhyming stories of Beaux and his wife Flo, two very successful African pachyderms and their family. The first two stories trace their wanderings from the Okavongo Delta and Addo National Park in Southern Africa to the UK; their professional education; their interests and expertise ; successes and failures .The third continuing story describes how today their five children have ventured out into many fields of professional life , entertainment and adventure. Some of these happenings you may have heard about before. Others, by well- known authors like Ovid, Mother Goose and Samuel Taylor Coleridge you might have read many years ago in a very different historical and literary context.

Jonathan Smulian is a descendant of a family that left Lithuania in the 1880s and emigrated to the Cape Colony in South Africa. He is retired after 60 years of practice as an international city and regional planner and architect. He has lived in many cities in 12 countries and has worked in 26 countries In Africa, Europe, the Middle and Far East, the Caribbean and Central and South America. He was born in South Africa and has three nationalities having emigrated to the UK and later to the USA .He is a graduate of the Universities of Cape Town and Liverpool. He is the author of hundreds of published reports, articles and commentaries on urban development and architecture and more recently his short stories. essays and poems have been published in a number of literary and online journals in the USA. He has experienced wars, earthquakes, hurricanes and uprisings in many parts of the world and travelled extensively for both work and pleasure. After living in a new town in Virginia and in the forest in Vermont he now lives with his artist wife in an historic 19C bungalow in Houston Texas where in the days of a pandemic he spends his time enjoying life and writing and illustrating his work.