Thinking Living is the musings of Liz Ayling, a Malta-based, British business writer and mother to one young son.  Liz has 20 years experience in corporate and feature writing and has crafted words for the some of most innovative, mundane and bizarre of companies and individuals.  Her favourite (low-point) assigments include press releases for a poultry farm (wearing wellies for the site visit) and speeches for two distinguished political men in Malta, who inadvertently swapped papers on the podium and then had to adlib through the bits written personally for them. 

For the most part though, Liz writes some pretty useful stuff for companies in the telecoms, tourism, healthcare, transport and ICT sectors.  Having worked in the UK for the European Commission and a large London ad agency, some people wondered why she migrated to Malta.  Marriage and Mediterranean warmth and light sum up the main reasons, but it was probably just meant to be. 

Now, 14 years on, she feels privileged to be able to manage a reasonable work-life balance operating out of her farmhouse in the centre of an old Maltese village.  Her neighbours include a small number of foreign expats and a large number of little old local ladies.  She feels privileged to live somewhere you can pay the shopkeeper and petrol pump attendant the next day, or the next or the next week, if you don’t have the right change or any change on the day.    

The ’shop’ part of this blog evolved from a home business Liz set up when her son was still in nappies.  She found a lot of very useful products to help parents were not available in Malta, and so set out to spread the word on those that made sense to her.  Now, she’s keener to use pen to promote things she finds valuable, be they ideas or products, and to write notes from a small island to a potentially far wider audience beyond her shores.