Alice Morrison
Alice Morrison was born in 1963 in the Edinburgh Infirmary. Six weeks later, just after her mother had successfully taken her law exams, her parents Jim and Fredi boarded a ship and sailed to Africa. For the first 8 years of her life, Alice got to run free in the African Bush, roaming around the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda, hunting tadpoles and running away from snakes.
At the age of 11, by now the family was living in Ghana, it was back to Scotland to St Denis and Cranley Academy for Young Ladies, where she had to wear two sets of knickers – under and over – and a velour hat to church.
At Edinburgh University, she studied Arabic and Turkish and discovered the joys of the Poetry Society and the Socialist Worker’s club – both joined because she fancied the guy that ran them. Six memorable months were spent living in Damascus, where she faced down the secret police and survived on a diet of bread, condensed milk and jam because she was a terrible cook.
After university she spent two years teaching English in Cairo and exploring the country. Hitchhiking lifts on military trucks across the Western Desert and spending afternoons sleeping with the stray dogs in the shade of the Pharaonic temples of the Luxor.
Moving to London, she pursued a career in journalism which had started in Dubai at “What’s on in Dubai” and worked at Technical Review Middle East (there is nothing she doesn’t know about concrete decay) in London. From there to Middle East Broadcasting, the first Arabic Satellite News Station and then BBC World TV, BBC Arabic TV and the BBC News Channel where she became Editor of the daytime hours.
For the new millennium she moved North to Manchester and onto the internet with www.supanet.com and started to break out into adventures: the Snowdon Challenge, crossing Costa Rica coast to coast, Kilimanjaro, ice climbing in the Andes, climbing the Ruwenzoris....
After 9 years as CEO of Vision+Media, a quango dedicated to growing the creative industries in the Northwest, she was flung off the corporate hamster wheel by the Tory government cuts.
It was a turning point as she entered the Tour D’Afrique and raced her bike from Cairo to Cape Town. Bitten with the adventure bug, she went on to run the Marathon Des Sables, the Nomad’s ultra – which she won by default as she was the only woman to enter – and UTAT Atlas-Trail.
Smitten by Morocco, she is currently based there, and has just completed the world first “Atlas to Atlantic Trek.”
www.alicemorrison.co.uk
