Former village policeman, John Cooper, has moved a long way since he used to pound the beat in Symonds Yat, near Ross-on-Wye.

He told the Ross Gazette that ‘Life is what you make it.’

John was the local Beat officer for the Goodrich, Whitchurch and Symonds Yat ‘patch’ from 1982 until his retirement in 2004. It was a time of great change when the village police station, where he lived with his young family, ceased to be a police station and became ‘home’. Although the Police sign disappeared John didn’t, and for years afterwards people were always turning up for a chat, a moan, or a bit of advice.

Duties also changed for village police officers and before John retired he became a ‘Beat Manager,’ still responsible for day to day policing but with an additional element of public engagement and crime prevention. He said: “This produced results. A public funded camera system at Goodrich Castle car park, a trial of small smart TVs in rural post offices displaying updateable crime information, an email based weekly crime report, a sponsored car for the use of Beat Managers and eventually the creation and establishment of a residential support house for ex prisoners with substance abuse problems.

And even after he retired from the force he said retirement didn’t really happen, John simply moved sideways to manage the charity that operated the support house.

As a young man John served for nine years in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy crewing two aircraft carriers HMS Bulwark and HMS Eagle. This resulted in a ‘love affair’ with the sights, sounds and smells of South East Asia and in 2010 it dragged him back to settle in the sunshine of Saigon in the south of Vietnam. The city is now renamed as Ho Chi Minh City but to anyone pre-war it will always be ‘Saigon’.

John passes his time writing books, swimming and, in his words, ‘wrestling with his piano’. His books are published on Amazon kindle in ebook format and the ‘adult’ books (Subject to Status, Black Nothing, The Ten Bob Notes, The Gun and New Horizon) are also available in paperback format at Amazon Books.

He has five ‘historical adult drama’ novels, three short stories and four children’s books published under his full name John Arthur Cooper.