I Do All This Alone,

I Don't Like Dealing With Money Transactions In Poor Countries. I Get Confused Between The Feeling That I Shouldn't Haggle With Poverty And Getting Ripped Off

The Success That Comes From My Books Is Not Something I Feel Very Comfortable With. Past A Certain Point You Have To Accept The Idea That The Success Is A Lot To Do With The Timing And Luck And That Divorces You From It Massively. There Are Aspects Of It That I Haven't Got Used To At All. But I've Enjoyed Some Parts Of It Massively. It Relates To The Same Reason I Did A Lot Of Backpacking — Partly For The Experience — It's Something To Tell My Grandkids. It's A Weird Chain Of Events To Have In Your Life.

I Don’t Keep A Travel Diary. I Did Keep A Travel Diary Once And It Was A Big Mistake. All I Remember Of That Trip Is What I Bothered To Write Down. Everything Else Slipped Away, As Though My Mind Felt Jilted By My Reliance On Pen And Paper. For Exactly The Same Reason I Don’t Travel With A Camera. My Holiday Becomes The Snapshots And Anything I Forget To Record Is Lost.

I Wrote A Whole Novel Before The Beach. Unpublishable. Junk. But, For Some Reason I Stuck At Novels And Wrote A Second. Still Not Sure Why I Didn't Give Up. Stubborn, Maybe.

I Can Kid People, Including Myself, Into Believing That Something On The Page Will Work. But When You Film It, You Just Think, "oh ...".