DIRECTION OF TRAVEL

Starting on 1st March 2026 I plan to republish some of my Sunday Times travel features from the 1990s and add some other bits of travel writing written in the last few years.

….

From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s I made a sort of a living as a freelance feature writer for newspapers and magazines. I wrote regularly for Design Week, occasionally for Marketing and a bunch of other marketing-communications related titles. I also wrote eighteen hundred words a week for Television Today which at the time was published as a pull-out supplement inside The Stage. I focussed on new drama and light-entertainment.

In 1993 I started writing travel features for the Sunday Times. I knew a lot about travel and nothing at all about writing travel features. I was saved from disaster by having as my editor the legendary Christine Walker. Her generosity and forbearance allowed me to learn on the job. I set out to teach myself how to write travel features and bought a Collins Pocket Spelling book.

I knew I was lucky but I did not fully appreciate just how lucky. The Sunday Times paid a pound a word ~ the equivalent of £2.50 in 2026 money ~ and Christine never complained when I delivered an extra hundred on top of the word count we had agreed. She paid on delivery, not on publication. They paid me for photographs and they paid me for work that was syndicated to other Murdock owned papers in Australia. These occasional large chunks of cash, added to my weekly stipend from Television Today meant that I was in danger of earning my living from writing for the first time in my life.

One day the Television Today was published with the mastehead subtly changed to Television Toady. I’m not sure that anyone noticed. I certainly didn’t. My father called me to column and insisted that he enjoyed it phoned me in great delight

After the paper moved to Wapping, Christine held court and commissioned her writers from the bar at the Groucho Club. Even at the extreemly generous wordrate we freelancers could not have afforded the Groucho membership fees even if we had wanted to join the sort of club that would accept us as members. So the drinks were on her. Her bar bills must have been more than her salary. She explained that the advertising in the travel section made more money for the paper than the advertising revenue from all the other sections put together and that as a consequence no one in accounts at Wapping saw fit to questioned her expenses.

One early evening Ned Sherrin who was passing our table, missed his footing and without warning or introduction plumped down next to me. I was more than a little overwhelmed. It was clear that he was ever so slightly pissed. He was responding to a call from the doorway by a taxi driver booked, or so he claimed, to take Mister Sherry to Broadcasting House.

Sherrin was dressed in a moss-green velvet suit with a matching moss-green floppy bow tie. He looked like a slightly threadbare, generously overstuffed sofa. His arrival at our table coincided with the delivery of my drink. A large Tanqueray & Gordons with a small Schweppes tonic on the side. Without a word Sherrin picked up my glass and drained the neat gin in a single gulp. Without pause or, I suspect, much thought he bounced to his feet thanked us with a wave of the hand and continued on his journey towards the front door. By now the whole bar had gone quiet. From the corner by the window a voice was heard to say

“ Oh for goodness sake. Where on earth does she think she’s going in that get up?”

As he approached the door Sherrin must have noticed the silence in the room, felt the palpable air of expectation, realised that he “had the audience” and felt that he owed it to them and to his art to “make an exit”. In slow motion he raised one hand above his head without breaking stride and, finding he had hit his mark at the door exactly and on cue, described a one-hundred and eighty degree pirouette. As his upper body completed its half circle he discovered that inexplicably one of his feet was now on back-to front. His upper body continued to revolve while his feet remained on opposite-lock and rooted in place. Now he found that his legs were tied in a knot of such tightness and complexity that it was doubtful if even a rear-Admiral’s marlinspike could undo it. He fell to the floor.

Most of the people in the room were too drunk to stand, nevertheless they all leapt to their feet as one, threw up their hands in appreciation and with a single voice roared “ENCORE”