'97, New Year: New You

travel the world

Strap on the backpack and hit the road - but do more than just follow the herd

Going round the world seemed to be the perfect solution. I had been working in telephone sales for a year and hated it. The stress ofphoning people whose job it was to get rid of me made me literally sick every morning. With no romantic ties and no idea what to do for a "proper job"there was no obvious reason to stay in grey, cold, expensive London.

Everyone kept telling me how brave I was. I didn't understand. Having the time of my life, not working, living in tropical climates, meeting new people - that wasn't brave, that was heaven. Of course I shed a few drunken tears at leaving my friends and family, but I knew they'd still be here when I got back, so what did I have to lose? Even saving up the pounds 3,000 I'd budgeted for wasn't difficult - my sales job was pretty well paid and I was determined.

I left with two friends, but we soon realised we were not alone. There were thousands of us - all clones of each other - nearly all graduates, trying to escape "real life" by traipsing across the globe. Most followed an invisible "backpackers' trail" guided by a dog-eared paperback known as "the Bible", alias Lonely Planet through Europe, India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and the USA. Bumping into someone you met at the top of the Himalayas a month later in an Indonesian temple was perfectly normal.

In Australia, the lure of big bucks put me back into telephone sales. But being stuck in Ozzie suburbia depressed me more than than I thought was possible and my friendship with my travelling companion fell apart, something I will always regret. I left the job and hit the road again. Travelling alone was undeniably scary at first, but strangely liberating. I could constantly re-invent myself and do whatever I liked, but most of all, I had more fun - people talk to you more easily if you're not huddled in a cosy group.

By the time I reached Thailand I was an "experienced" traveller. I learned Thai and visited "un-touristy" areas, both to "get to know the people" and to save money. I lived on 100 baht a day (pounds 2.50) and was proud of it. In retrospect, I exploited people's hospitality and gave little back. I haggled over pennies and then wondered why many Thais seemed bitter towards tourists. It took me a while to catch on.

I had also adopted the traveller's mentality that I was indestructible and had no responsibilities. But reality winded me a few times. The first was when I helped a British guy I'd met briefly on the train through a Malaysian border control, despite the fact he was so stoned he could hardly walk. My sense of travellers' camaraderie could have had me facing a death sentence.

The second was when I visited the Poste Restante in Bangkok. I received a letter telling me my grandfather had died a month before. I cried for three hours on the post office stairs. How could I have been so selfish not to have been in touch for so long? I was so sorry and there was nothing I could do about it.

But the hardest part of travelling was coming home. I'd worked for five months in a refugee camp in Thailand and, corny though it sounds, it changed my life. The bungy jumps and sunsets pale into insignificance against the courage the Vietnamese refugees showed living in a rat-infested camp for seven years. I lived a comfortable expat life and drove every day into the camp which housed 30,000 refugees. Each person had a living space of around five foot by six foot in a bamboo hut. Many had seen their family and friends drown, die of malaria or be murdered by Thai pirates. One man's 14-year-old daughter gave birth after being raped by one of the Thai camp guards. Many didn't knowif they would ever leave the camp. Thailand had been my paradise, but it was definitely their hell. It was mind-blowing, humbling, but at the same time fantastic fun, and I sobbed uncontrollably when my 60 students left to go to America where they had gained asylum, so worried was I about how they would cope.

It was three months before I told my friends I was home, and it took me several years to properly re-forge friendships and find where I was going in life. In fact, the only thing I could do for a long time was write obsessively - which is how I got to do what I do today. Now I write for various organisations about Third World development issues and work part-time for Tourism Concern, which specialises in the social and environmental problems related to tourism. I also write on travel, environmental and social issues for papers and magazines - and I love it. Travelling did help me find where I wanted to be, but it wasn't an easy journey. And I never went back to a "proper job". I'm not that braven

Sue Wheat

get a place in the country

The timing could not be better for getting hold of a rural retreat. But how restful will it really be?

We have all come across those people who announce brightly on a steaming summer weekday in the city that, thank goodness, they are off to the country for the weekend. A little place in Suffolk/Norfolk/ Kent/Dorset/the Lake District, don't you know. So, dammit, isn't it about time we had one? The kids will love all that fresh air, those cycle tracks, beaches and real farms, instead of adventure playgrounds with a few air-brushed animals. We won't think about frozen pipes and failed heating, just dinner parties on lavender-edged lawns with ladies-who-do.

So much for rural fantasies. Even so, the green light in 1997 may not get much greener. House prices are rising, but more slowly in rural areas away from commuter belts, and the cost of borrowing is not that important for the country bolt-holer, who is likely to be either cash-rich or worth a fair bit. And the crucial shortage of properties looks like easing in the next few months, according to those agents who had a busy December for valuations. Go for it, the agents cry, as they would. Before Easter, if possible, as prices will be higher at the end of the season. But, they add, only if you are prepared to take on all the expense and headaches of another property.

For the lowdown, it is not a bad idea to buy from a family of weekenders. At the very least something can be learnt from their reasons for selling. How accessible is accessible? Two hours on a Wednesday morning, or three slow-moving hours on a Friday night? While they are telling you about the peace and isolation of the spot, ask if they have to get the car out every time they need a pint of milk. If the nice man next door can't look after the house any more, who is going to do it for you? And if their children simply refuse to spend one more weekend in the back of beyond, take a look at your own truculent teenagers. Norfolk, and particularly the unspoilt north Norfolk coast, is one of those best-kept secrets that everyone talks about. It is perfect for children, until that is they get into their mid-teens. Jumping off sand dunes along miles of windswept beach doesn't seem so much fun then.

Malcolm Duffy of estate agent Beltons recently took just 10 days to sell a weekend home to a family with younger, more biddable children. He finds that most want the same thing, a brick-and-flint cottage with beamed ceilings for around pounds 70,000 to pounds 90,000, in a pretty village within 10 miles of the coast.

The great thing about some weekend places is that you don't even have to leave the best bits of city life behind. The specialist cheese shop, the deli, the interesting greengrocer have all followed the green wellie trail. In Norfolk it leads to Burnham Market. These days it is the sort of place where you put on lipstick to go to the bakers, and the "Fulham farmers", as they call them locally, clog up the roads with their four- wheel drives. "You pay 20 per cent more for a place there," says Mr Duffy. "It is important to decide whether you want a real village with locals, or a smart village with everything on tap."

Break-ins are the nightmare of all second-home owners, which is why flats in large country houses are in such demand. A villager with a key is crucial for any number of crises, not just burglary. This doesn't come cheap, of course. There is no point complaining about the rates of the plumber who mended the burst pipes while you were seeing in the new year in London: the odd pint in the local doesn't cover emergencies.

So how far does the weekender go? Best to stay out of commuter areas like Hampshire - prices are high because of its convenience for London. If you see half the village heading for the nearest station you haven't gone far enough. James Bedford of Bedford's in Bury St Edmunds recommends a completely local affair - agent, solicitor, surveyor. "We cost less. The national companies come to us anyway for advice."

The big question is: how often will you use a second home? One couple who bought in Dorset laid some ground rules first. Only weddings and funerals would keep them away at weekends. No parties, ever. And they had to be out of London by mid-afternoon on a Friday and able to stay until Monday morning; Sunday evening traffic kills the country weekend dead.

It makes a great deal of sense for would-be weekenders to rent first. One woman who bought a farm cottage in rural Devon no doubt wishes she had. After a year of finding a bull in the field at the bottom of her garden, she asked a neighbour if the farmer ever moved it. "Oh yes," she replied, "when you're not here. 'E don't much like townies"n

Penny Jackson

write a book

Immense as the barriers may be, hard work, study of the market and lots of luck could make you the next Nick Hornby

Almost 100,000 books will be published in Britain during 1997. After gazing on that bald round number, plenty of wannabe writers will sit down at a keyboard around now and ask: why shouldn't mine be one of them? At this point, the more practical souls among them will get up again and research the market - whereupon their hopes will expire under an avalanche of wet blankets. It seems that, ever since the prophet of Ecclesiastes whinged that "of making many books there is no end", wise heads in the word trade have tried to deter newcomers.

First, you won't find an agent. Next, you won't snare a publisher. Then you'll appear in a minuscule print-run. Following that, you won't be stocked in bookstores. You won't get any reviews; or if you do, they'll be fatuous and dismissive. You'll never sell more than 400 copies and, as for making a single cent out of the whole enterprise - just forget it. Reading the advice that book-business insiders dispense to aspirants is like hearing a cracked Noel Coward record, its lyrics only slightly garbled: Don't put your daughter on the page, Mrs Worthington. Don't put your daughter on the page ...

And yet ... The profession may be overcrowded, but the trouble with all this well-meant discouragement is that too many hopefuls know too much about such starry exceptions as Nicholas Evans. Two years ago, the freelance film editor spent sleepless nights in Stockwell, wondering how to feed his children, before he chased a last-ditch hunch to Wyoming and found the story of a laid-back horse therapist. Now he controls a global product, The Horse Whisperer, with a worldwide value that (movie rights included) probably runs into eight figures.

Evans's saddle-sore romance may count as fiction's double-rollover jackpot, but every year a dozen other unknown contenders manage to beat the odds. After all, both agents and publishers can win friends and influence people by timely talent-spotting. It does their careers no harm to be in on the ground floor with Irvine Welsh or Nick Hornby. So the gate-keepers have precious little right to dissuade would-be stars from having a flutter, just because their own slush pile looks like the leaning tower of Pisa.

That said, the cold call with a bulky manuscript to a major London publisher can only be recommended to masochists and devotees of St Jude. Refine that figure of 100,000 titles down into categories, and you'll find that (for example) the whole of British fiction will make up only two per cent of it. And if you think that first novels - which will probably account for less than a tenth of that two per cent - have a hard time, try placing a second novel if its predecessor has done much less than win the Booker Prize.

So for fledgling writers without a high-profile agent, the realistic route to print can take either a straight or crooked course. The straight approach would be to forget about the glitzy London houses and try your luck with smaller independent publishers, especially in regions and nations beyond the metropolis. Some of the past decade's most memorable books have come from tiny stables far from Bloomsbury: Blackstaff in Belfast, Polygon in Edinburgh, the poetry specialist Bloodaxe in Newcastle, the surrealist hotbed of Dedalus in rural Cambridgeshire ... The annual Writer's Handbook (Macmillan) provides the best annotated list.

If even the little league lets you down, do it all yourself. The combination of home PC technology and the facilities of local Mac-based print studios have done away with whatever vestige of legitimacy the infamous vanity publishers once claimed. Anyone who needs a few hundred copies of a war memoir or a poetry collection to foist on friends and family can usually rustle up a quite presentable package via Yellow Pages.

Flasher characters can try the crooked way to fame. This means exploiting publishers' new-found love of hype and their propensity to work the Last Big Thing into the ground. First, it helps to be beautiful, or to lavish time and cash on making oneself so. In PR appeals to the trade, the phrase "eminently promotable" means either "babe" or "hunk".

Next, it boosts any tyro author's prospects to be famous - or notorious - already. So make a splash in an adjacent pool and then return to drafting that Proustian first novel. Publishers love media folk to death - if only because they can be relied on to hype their own work more effectively than the in-house hustlers could. If you can't host a prime-time TV chat show or pen a navel-gazing column in a broadsheet, then a couple of picturesque criminal convictions will do. (Nothing too bloody, mind, unless you want to muscle in on the thriving Kray reminiscence market.)

Last, and maybe most important: ensure that your book sounds rather like last year's surprise bestseller, but with a twist. Thus the line of male confessionals spawned by Fever Pitch has stretched out - if not until the crack of doom, then at least as far as Nicholas Whittaker's forthcoming account of his stint working on a top-shelf magazine (Blue Period from Gollancz in May - if you can hold out that long). Write a bittersweet chronicle of middle-class rural angst beside the Rayburn and your pastel- shaded jacket will proclaim: "In the tradition of Joanna Trollope". And so on, ad infinitum. Better still, spatchcock elements from more than one recent chart-topper, and the auction bids should go right through the roof. I'm off to devise a pitch for a snowbound Arctic mystery about a woman private eye who tames neurotic elk in Lapland. Any offers for The Norse Whisperer?n

Boyd Tonkin