a dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi
newsletter no. 33 august 2009

Aung San Suu Kyi is back under house arrest. As many of you know, she was put on trial earlier this year for violating the conditions of her imprisonment. Her ‘crime’ was allowing a stranger to swim uninvited to her lakeside home.

The trial was a sham, the purpose of which was to ensure that she will remain locked up until after the May 2010 elections. Her party, the National League for Democracy, won the last elections in 1990 but was never allowed to take power. She has spent 14 of the twenty years since that victory under house arrest.

Her continuing incarceration is despicable. Barack Obama has called for her ‘immediate unconditional release’. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, ‘She should not have been tried and she should not have been convicted.’ Gordon Brown is saddened and angry by the events, and is calling for further EU sanctions targeting the regime’s economic interests. Australia is consulting the international community on the need to put even more pressure on the Burmese regime to move down the path of democracy.

But is this the only way to go? For two decades the West has imposed sanctions on Burma. What have they achieved? The Burmese people have been further impoverished. Their leaders have become more ruthless and intransigent, brutally putting down two extraordinarily brave sets of pro-democracy protests in 1988 and 2007. China and North Korea have become their favoured trading partners. Aung San Suu Kyi has not been freed.

Simply put, sanctions will never bring about change in Burma because its despotic regime is supported by China. China needs Burma for its resources and, above all, access to the Indian Ocean. China’s strategic interests are more important – in their eyes – than the liberty of Suu Kyi and Burma’s other two thousand political prisoners. No surprise that it was China – along with Russia – which blocked a strongly-worded UN condemnation of the military government earlier this week.

Over the past few months I’ve been in touch with Thant Myint-U, historian, author and grandson of former UN Secretary-General U Thant. In July he told the Economist that we’re wrong to depict Burma as ‘a kind of velvet revolution gone wrong’. The paranoid regime’s inward-looking cast has been conditioned by centuries of invasions, among them by the British and, after independence in 1948, by American-backed Chinese Nationalists. Sanctions – stated the Economist – ‘have helped bring about no democratic transition in Asia—on the contrary. So imagine if the West reversed policy, dropped sanctions and pursued engagement. The generals have already looked at the development paths blazed by China and Vietnam and said they want to follow… Development (in Burma) could bring about swift changes to the political landscape, as eventually happened in Indonesia. Development, in other words, could be the fastest path to democracy.’

Thant Myint-U told me, ‘I’ve been in Burma a lot this past year, talking to everyone, and I’m absolutely convinced we need to do a lot more on the humanitarian/development side. It’s (1) very possible (2) urgently needed to help ordinary people who are in increasingly dire straits and (3) without economic improvement, I don’t think any political change will go in the right direction (nor will any democratic transition be sustainable). It’s the missing piece - and I think the pro-democracy campaigners are shooting themselves in the foot by not allowing for a more development-oriented approach from the outside. At the very least,’ he asks, ‘the UK government and the EU should be asked for a transparent assessment of the impact of sanctions (including the blocking of all international development assistance) over the past twenty years, as a way of opening up a proper debate.’

I met Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon while researching my book Under the Dragon. She told me of the importance of maximizing courage and minimizing fear. She spoke then, and at other times, of the need for dialogue. ‘Dialogue is the only way out of the problems we are facing here,’ she said.

Twenty years of Western sanctions have brought about no dialogue, no freedom from fear for the Burmese. In moral terms sanctions are justified. But in practical terms – because of China – they are doomed to fail. The UN special envoy to Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, has said that Suu Kyi is ‘absolutely indispensable to the resumption of a political process that can lead to national reconciliation’. That is correct. But rather than sanctions, it’s time for the international community to use targeted incentives to stimulate dialogue, and to bring an end to the regime’s blatant abuse of human rights. As Winston Churchill said, ‘To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.’ Let’s help to start the dialogue.

yours ever

Rory

In Search of a Meisterwerk
newsletter no. 32 june 2009

In summer the thoughts of young (and not-so-young) scribblers turn to literary festivals.  The valleys and city squares of Europe – and especially the British Isles -- burst forth with book launches, poetry slams and esoteric debates like radiant flowers.  I am just back from the Guardian Hay Festival, the inspirational annual book-lovers’-knees-up on the Welsh borders (among this year’s guest were Sarah Waters, Alain de Botton and Desmond Tutu).  Yesterday I gave my first reading in Berlin.  This coming weekend I’ll be in County Waterford speaking at the Lismore Festival of Travel Writing, along with Fergal Keane, Kate Adie and Dervla Murphy.

Festivals don’t only give authors the chance to get out of the house. Their primary importance – for me at least – is that they give us the chance to meet and talk with readers (without whom we wouldn’t be here of course).  This interaction never fails to produce something unexpected, giving the old grey matter a sharp kick up the back cranium, and as a consequence promotes more dynamic thinking and writing.

Take my talk at Hay.  I presented my prepared text on travel literature then – as is usual – invited questions from the audience.  This is always my favourite part of an event as one never knows what to expect.  At first there were a number of pleasant and predictable questions – where do your ideas come from?  how do you prepare for a journey?  what are you working on at the moment? – and I enjoyed answering them.  But then a member of the audience asked, ‘Mr. MacLean, you are living in Berlin now so can you tell us why no German has yet written the great post-unification novel?’

Great historical events almost always generate a great work of literature.  In Germany the First World War produced Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.  The ‘Golden Twenties’ spawned Alfred Döblin’s Alexanderplatz and Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin.  The Second World War’s literary legacy includes The Tim Drum, A Woman in Berlin and much of Heinrich Böll’s work (to name but a few).  Christa Wolf captured the ambitious optimism – and then bitter reality – of the East German socialist dream.  These authors are master storytellers, so who are their peers today?

Germany is proud of its contemporary, world-class authors.  Few other writers make me laugh – and think – as much as Thomas Brussig.  Ute Teller’s The Tower, winner of last year’s prestigious German Book Prize, is a monumental work on the collapse of communism. Julia Franck’s Blind Side of the Heart, also a German Book Prize winner and published this month in English, is a sweeping and deeply moving family saga (my interview with her is now on the Meet the Germans website).  But none of these works – and I am sure the authors themselves will agree with me – is der Wendemeisterwerk (the post-unification masterpiece).  Why?

Perhaps it’s a question of time?  Years can pass before an author finds that balance of detachment and engagement so necessary for the realisation of a powerful work based on an historical event.  Or perhaps it’s a question of perception?  Often seminal, enduring works aren’t recognised as such until long after their publication.  Maybe Ingo Schulze is writing the Great Reunification Novel now?  Or perhaps it’s simply not going to happen?  Ivan Klima wrote that after 1989 eastern European authors traded ‘totalitarianism for total entertainment’.  Let me be the first to admit that drinking a café latte on Ku’damm or watching the new Star Trek movie is a whole lot more pleasant than plumbing the depths of your -- and your nation’s -- soul while staring at a blank computer screen.

Travel writing classes are not proven to stimulate the production of great literature, but they are useful for new writers who want to learn about techniques, hone their skills and market their work. For those of you – German or not – who are interested in travel writing classes, this autumn fellow scribbler Dea Birkett and I are running a WriteAway weekend workshop in Marrakech (17-20 September).  This will be a fun, intense weekend course (with a time spare to see the sites).  I know Marrakech well, and love it, so I hope you’ll consider joining us there.  

If Morocco doesn’t take your fancy, this autumn we’re also running one-day workshops in London (Saturdays 12 September and 7 November), Berlin (Saturday 10 October) and Dublin (Saturday 21 November)  So will a Meisterwerk emerge from one of the workshops?  Well, t hat’s up to you…

yours ever

Rory

Magic Bus in the USA, and The New Book
newsletter no. 31 May 2009

A couple of months ago ‘Magic Bus’ was released in the States while, here in Berlin, I’ve begun to write my new book.  

For months I’ve been circling that room in my mind which will become the book, feeling my way forward, wondering where to place the door which I'll walk through into a new world.

I’ve often been asked, where does a book begin? For me it begins with a passion, a memory or an obsession.  In a way I started this book back in 1977, when I first saw the Berlin Wall. The sight of that brutal structure shook me to the core.  It was the moment I decided to become a writer.

Over that Wall lived two East Berlin writers whose work I’ve come to deeply admire. Many of you will be familiar with the first of them, Christa Wolf.  In an interview she was once asked, is content truth?

‘More than that.  The content is first and foremost your material. And that material has to be worked and reworked. Of course it’s silly to say the material is lying on the street. The material doesn't lie on the street. Rather, each author has a specific material at a specific time. And the key is to hit exactly that point of strongest affinity, of inner necessity, at the right time. That's what defines the narrative tone.’

http://www.signandsight.com/features/417.html

Earlier this year I had dinner with the second author, Thomas Brussig, the gifted and hilarious creator of ‘Heroes Like Us’ and other books who I first met and interviewed back in September.  Over the meal I shared these thoughts with him (as well as my anxiousness at the start of this literary journey).  The next morning he wrote to me enthusing, ‘You are writing your first novel now, and you are discovering the novel as a form. Better: the possibilities of the form. This is an amazing process!  Each novel is an invention of its form, and each novel is unique, concerning its form.  I know, how you feel. I love the novel: everything is possible -- when you find the form.  So I think, not only content is truth, but form (that includes the “narrative tone”) is truth too. A novel can tell the truth by telling lies -- isn´t that amazing?  So if you want to love the novel as a form -- write it!’

Berlin is the place where I started my creative journey; where I worked on movies with Dietrich and Bowie, and returned to ten years later to write my first travel book ‘Stalin’s Nose’, where I’m about to write ‘Chapter One…’ I believe, and feel, that the timing is right for this book.  After all, writing this book is the reason I’m now living in Berlin.

At dinner Thomas asked why this city?  I told him many of the things mentioned over the last months in my Goethe Institut blog: that I respect the courageous and moving German response to history, that I admire the dynamism of this rough, magic place, that I want to understand why the Germans are so obsessed with systems, elevating their importance -- even at the start of the twenty-first century – over that of the individual.  For more on that, and how I was almost squashed like an audacious bug by a crowd of Berliners, check out this week’s story at

http://blog.goethe.de/meet-the-germans/

Berlin has long attracted writers.  The historian Peter Gay wrote that living in the city in the Golden Twenties was the dream of ‘the composer, the journalist, the actor; with its superb orchestras, its 120 newspapers, its forty theatres, Berlin was the place for the ambitious, the energetic, the talented.’  The Twenties are long gone of course, and goodness knows if I’ll manage to produce anything of value over the next few years, or even finish the book (I have a recurring dream of being stuck forever on chapter one chapter one chapter one…).  Originality is an uncommon achievement.  All I can do is what any of us can do, to try to express that ‘inner necessity’, and – in the moments when despair sets in and I need help defining the true value of art, click through to Josh Hollands’ animated cartoon, to put it all into perspective…

http://www.joyengine.com/art/what-is-art/

Back to ‘Magic Bus’.  It’s published by New York’s IG Publishers.  There’s been reviews in the New York Times and the Boston Globe, as well as a big weekend spread on the wonderful World Hum.  So it’s time to fire up those engines, and away I go!

yours ever

Rory

Berlin...with Mrs. Cat and Maus
newsletter no. 28 autumn 2008

A crescent of tall windows opens onto the linden trees. Late afternoon sunlight spills across the parquet floor. I've set my desk at the back of this light, elegant ballroom, with its soaring ceilings and high double doors, and I'm excited enough to dance.

In September I moved to Berlin with Mrs. Cat and our six-year-old son Maus, swapping our rambling quarter-acre of Dorset garden for this polished oak field in the centre of the city. We're here for a couple of years for me to write my new book, which is set in Germany. Also Mrs. Cat wants to discover her German side. Her mother was born in Hamburg but she's never lived in the country. And Maus -- who speaks only English -- is to attend one of the lively, free, international schools set up by the Berlin Senate after reunification. In two years he'll be bilingual.

There is another reason too.

Everyone knows that Berlin is a happening place. Cheap rent, breathless nightlife, terrific public transport and an edgy sense of danger ­ without actually being dangerous ­ is drawing thousands of people here from around the world. Spanish students gossip on the U-Bahn. Israeli and German clubbers tumble out of Mitte's Bang Bang Club. So many New York artists have opened studios in Prenzlauer Berg that one half expects a Lexington Avenue Express to pull into its S-Bahn station. In some ways this is a vibrant, wishful revival of the Golden Twenties (with a Deutsch-Rock beat). But forget any sense of déjà vu, something profoundly different is happening this time around, and it has everything to do with memory, courage and Freud.

Germany is so open and dynamic today as a direct consequence of taking responsibility for its history. Just up the road from my apartment, next to the Brandenburg Gate, is the Holocaust Memorial, the undulating labyrinth of concrete plinths which commemorates the European Jews murdered during the Second World War. To the south stands Daniel Libeskind's tortured Jewish Museum. The black husk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943, casts a long shadow along glittering Kurfürstendamm. On Genslerstrasse the former Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison chronicles the zeal of the iniquitous Ministry for State Security in controlling and repressing East Germans.

Can you imagine Russians sanctifying a former gulag as a memorial to the millions murdered by Stalin? Or for that matter Americans setting aside five acres of land in central Washington to acknowledge the napalming of civilians during the Vietnam War?  Or London raising a monument to the slave trade on Trafalgar Square?

Modern Germany ­ in a courageous, humane and moving manner -- is subjecting itself to national psychoanalysis. This is a Freudian idea, that the repressed (or at least unspoken) will fester like a canker unless it is brought to the light. The insistence on memory ­ on facing the past -- is anciently Jewish, and now Western: the conviction that for the psychic health of a society its past atrocities must be unearthed and confessed, as a condition of healing.

The subject is controversial, as it demands honest reflection and soul-searching debate on questions of identity, memorialisation and the shifting identities of perpetrators and victims, but it's one of the reasons I'm here ­ and a starting point on my journey into this city and country.

Every week in the blog I will explore all that thrills, delights, haunts and infuriates me during my stay in Berlin. I invite you to join me at

http://www.goethe.de/meet-the-germans


There will be stories, interviews and anecdotes as well as current and practical information for virtual visitors and fleet-footed tourists alike. Where are the best new sushi restaurants in Munich? Who has a wall in their head? Which szene pub should you be seen at (I'll get right on to researching the kneipen culture tonight at my local). From candy bombers to ICE trains, beer steins to bureaucrats, I'll try to dispel the staid stereotypes and challenge the philistine prejudices which endure for too many Brits. Elsewhere on the Goethe-Institut site I'll be writing a monthly profile of the best minds, makers and movers here ­ starting with author Thomas Brussing whose HEROES LIKE US is one of the funniest novels to come out of Germany in the last decade. A knowledge of history is necessary to understand the present and to create a future. I hope you'll join me ­ along with Mrs. Cat and Maus ­ in our new home at the beating heart of modern Europe.

yours ever,

Rory

    This week I'm in a special place, that world apart. I love being here; it is my deserted Canadian lake, my sunny, unending Italian lunch, my vista from the top of Ben Nevis. It is the place in the world where I am most happy.

     I'm here in my study conjuring up the next book. I have the idea. I've found its emotional core. I'm drawing into the mix current affairs, popular concerns and questions about identity. I am imagining possibilities before stepping out the front door.

     As with all my books it will be a personal work; part journey part memoir, with perhaps a glimpse of a world as we wish it could be. I'll produce no coldly objective documentary. Long ago travel writing betrayed that objectivity is a chimera. Uniquely, outside autobiography, the travel writer acknowledges his or her subjectivity. As Colin Thubron wrote, 'Subjectivity is implicit in the first-person "I" who roams his (or her) written landscape. The late Nicolas Bouvier, the Continent's finest travel writer, expressed the same view when he said, 'I move around my page like I move around the world.'

copyright cambridgejones.com

     It's proving to be a memorable summer aboard the bus, not least because I had dinner with the gentle, hilarious and incomparable poet Roger McGough.

     News first of Magic Bus. Viking published it at the end of June. At the end of July, BBC Radio 4 broadcast it as a Book of the Week. The wonderful Kerry Shale, with over 200 radio plays, three Sony awards plus all of Bill Bryson's books and Life of Pi to his credit, was the reader. Anyone who missed the transmissions, lives beyond The Pale or finds themselves at a loose end on the net, can hear them again at
 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml 

     This month I'm speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival where I'll be showing some of the glorious, evocative Sixties and Seventies travel photographs which I've been loaned by trail "veterans": wide-eyed passengers, decrepit London buses, young lovers and monuments destroyed by wars in a region swept through extraordinary changes since the Summer of Love.

     Can you believe it? Yesterday I started insulating the loft. "Cold winter coming," say the farmers in our corner of Dorset, looking at the sky, sucking on their teeth. I used to be in awe their pronouncements, moved by the intuition of modern men and women still in touch with the forces of nature. Until I asked one of them how he learnt to read the signs. "What signs?" he answered me. "I just watch the weather report at the end of the ten o'clock news."

     Before the chilly weather sets in, there's a hot summer aboard the bus. Magic Bus is published at the end of this month. I'm speaking at the Guardian Hay Book Festival on 4th June, the Shakespeare and Company "Travel in Words" celebration in Paris on 15th June and at the ICA in London on 29th June. In August I'll be at Edinburgh where -- as at the other festivals -- I'll be showing some of the glorious, evocative Sixties and Seventies travel photographs which I've been loaned by trail "veterans": wide-eyed passengers, decrepit London buses, young lovers and monuments destroyed by wars in a region swept through extraordinary changes since the Summer of Love. The Sunday Times Magazine is running a selection of the images -- along with my story of the journey that changed the way we travel the world -- on 18th June.

     'Now that you've finished your book what are you going to do?' asked my brother. 'Lie on the beach?'

     Magic Bus is finished. Yesterday the proof-read manuscript was sent to the typesetter. The jacket has been designed and the subtitle ('On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India') agreed. BBC Radio 4 has chosen it for Book of the Week. Publication is set for June 29th. But finished? Not quite yet.

     For one thing there are the rights clearances. Pop music was among the most important creations of the 1960s. Lyrics inspired, guided -- or in some cases misguided -- that generation and their search for a new way of living. I heard this sentiment expressed again and again during my research. In an early issue of the Village Voice I read of a Dylan debut performance, 'His voice is crude, his appearance scruffy and as a performer he lacks all traces of a professional. But one brief listening to the emotional understatement in his voice emphasizes the power of his lyrics and his genuine concern for the state of the world.' As far as I'm concerned, no book can be written about the Sixties without quoting -- or paraphrasing -- lyrics.

     I'm just home from France. I was invited to Paris to give a reading at Shakespeare and Company, the tumbledown American bookshop on the Left Bank. I say 'at' Shakespeare and Company; 'outside' would be more accurate. On rue de la Bucherie, surrounded by about sixty book lovers and bemused tourists, between the peels of Notre Dame's bells and the heckling of passing down-and-outs, I read aloud from Falling for Icarus.

     Shakespeare and Company opened its doors in 1921. From here Europe first heard of new American writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and -- after the war -- Ginsberg and the Beats. Its owner Sylvia Beach published Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would take the risk. Fifty-five years ago George Whitman, an east coast vagabond-cum-bibliophile, bought this 'little rag-and-bone shop of the heart'. Since then, as well as selling millions of English-language books, he has given home to some 50,000 poets, novelists and students.

     I lie to myself. I tell myself great big porkers. It's the way I write books.

     My working day isn't unusual. I sit down at my desk -- after getting up and dressing three-year-old Finn and walking the dog around the village -- around 8.30am. I jump up to make tea every forty minutes or so but, apart from a short hour's lunch, I tend to work straight through until about 5.30pm.

     But by that time I'm exhausted. I feel as if -- and I like this feeling -- the energy of eight hours of my One-and-Only-Life has been drained out of me and impressed into the day's pages. So to enable myself rise up the next morning I begin to lie.

     It's Easter Saturday. Katrin is out for a Girls' Evening. Finn is drifting away toward the Land of Nod. And I've snapped open a cool Kronenbourg to sit down and write this month's newsletter.

     I'm not used to writing with a drink. Maximol vitamin supplements, Gui Pi Wan Chinese herbs and chocolate Hob Nobs are all central to the creative process for me, especially being just a few weeks away from completing the revised first draft of Magic Bus. But as a rule intoxicants do not stimulate my productivity. In fact, if I open a third bottle of beer this evening I'm as likely to fall asleep under my desk as finish the newsletter. Which is as a bit of a paradox given that I'm writing about the Sixties hippie trail, hashish, LSD, Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg.

     But I do want to write this month about alcohol, and celebration (though perhaps not 'cosmic consciousness'). Falling for Icarus will be published in paperback by Penguin in April and to mark the occasion you all are invited to the London launch.

     If I climb on top of my desk and lift my eyes above the crumpled notepads and empty cookie wrappers, I can see on the horizon the End of the Road. At Last. I'm 95,000 words along my hippie trail journey, with only one chapter and ten days left to complete the first draft. Of course there are three or four rewrites to come, but finishing the first draft is for me the most moving milestone along the route. The conceiving and writing of this first stage of Magic Bus has been -- as with my other books -- emotional and draining (as illustrated by my consumption of gallons of Greek coffee and acres of chocolate biscuits). Subsequent drafts will depend more on analytical thought, hence engage the heart less (and reduce my caffeine and fast-sugar needs). In a couple of weeks the time for craftsmanship will come, with extensive revision, with the aspiration of living up to Flaubert's dictate that prose is like hair that shines with combing.

Hence I've been lax in writing new Newsletters, for which many apologies. These last months I seem to have done little other than write. Real Life has continued to unfold beyond the confines of my study, or so I've been informed. Finn is now two-and-a-half years old, Tess the Golden Retriever just turned seven and George W. Bush has been re-elected (in case you too missed the news). 

     Few annual events shake me as much as the Edinburgh Book Festival -- except perhaps my attempts to complete a tax return. I never fail to Learn at the Festival, as well as this year to laugh with Jan Morris, to shake hands with Robert McCrum and to meet Malise Ruthven, a leading authority on Islam and author of the essential A Fury for God. But the writer who most shook me was the Scottish exile and intellectual nomad Kenneth White. White left the UK in 1967 to settle in France and his original and exploratory books have won some of that country's most prestigious literary prizes. Yet he's little known in Scotland, and almost unheard of in England. Which is our great loss. Last Saturday in a talk on his essay Writing the Road he said, 'The individual mind needs a literature that widens perspective and opens hearts.' His latest 'waybook' is such a work, and it now sits on my desk alongside Hesse, Robert Byron and Kerouac.

     In this month's newsletter I'm not going to babble on about Rory's Top 5s on the Penguin website or the generous Greek correspondent who has offered to bring me a jar of incomparable Cretan mountain thyme honey when he's next in the UK. Instead I'm posting below my article -- On Death and Daedalus -- which appeared in The Times in May. Those of you who didn't catch it then may be interested in reading more about the story behind Falling for Icarus: A Journey among the Cretans (which has just been published by Viking in the UK). Those of you who did see it, apologies for this repetition.

     As I've said before in the newsletter, I wouldn't write books if I couldn't reach or be reached by readers; This Means You. Later this summer I'll be appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival (Thursday 26 August) and at the Cheltenham Literature Festival (Wednesday 13 October). I hope that I'll see some of you there. But whether you can come or not, please do feel free to email me about Icarus or travel writing or even the cost of aviation fuel in Crete. I'd love to hear from you -- as always.

yours ever,

Rory

I just have to tell you the news. It's been such a Greek day ­ which started almost three years ago. After building and flying my aeroplane on Crete, I packed up for the drive home to the UK. The flying machine's fuselage fitted neatly on top of my car but the wings were a problem.

"Don't even think of carrying them back to England," insisted my friend Jorgos. He lowered his voice as he always did at moments of inspiration. "My sister works at the fruit co-operative in Hania. She'll truck your wings to Covent Garden on top of the next load of oranges ­- for free." 

It was a helpful suggestion, especially as each wing was 17 feet long and tended to lift off the roof rack when I drove above 18 mph. So I agreed, dropped off the wings at Jorgos' brother's warehouse and headed for home.

'Hello? Anyone home?' 

Well, I am -- at last.  Over the past four months I've confronted Turkish buses and Iranian hospitality, armed Afghan warlords and naked Indian sadhus. I've stuck my toe in the Bosphorus and the Euphrates. I've watched the sun rise over the Ganges and set behind the Himalayas. I've been humbled by tireless aid workers in Kabul, avoided a band of Maoists tour guides in Pokhara and sung along with Nepal's most dissolute 'sixties rock band. I've travelled by land over 10,000 kilometres from Istanbul to Kathmandu, following the original hippie/Asia Overland trail. 

So now the real journey can begin -- the writing of Book No. 6 (which is due to be published by Penguin in 2006).

What do travel writers take on their travels? A notebook and pen, of course.  A pocket scribble pad to jot down observations through the day. Plus a Swiss Army knife (remember to stow it in checked luggage for flights), a money belt with emergency dollars, a photocopy of passport and visas. Today I'm making final arrangements for my next trip. My ticket is booked.  I've done my background reading.  I've swapped my indulgent Trumper's shaving brush for an ancient, one-bristle affair.  I'm debating whether to take one pair of trousers or two.  What else? The secret is to take as little as possible, apart from a large sense of adventure...and a big bottle of peppermint foot lotion.

In a couple of days I'll be travelling from Istanbul to India, along the Asia Overland Trail, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The journey will form the basis of my next book, to be published in spring 2006 (there's more to the story but I'm being cagey!).  Penguin-Viking have bought it, along with 'Falling for Icarus' (which will be in the stores in the spring). I'm tremendously excited about the move to Penguin.

My cup runneth over!  Many thanks to those of you, dear readers, who took the time to help me to come up with a title for my Crete book.  I received over 120 suggestions and at last we're there...almost!

Regular readers of the newsletter will remember the story of the new book: -

Two years ago my mother died. In the moment of her death, as I threw open her bedroom window to let her soul soar free, I wanted to fly.  To rise above my mourning.  To feel wings lift me into the warm spring sky.

The compulsion was the single clear certainty in my then dislocated life.  I grabbed hold of it.  And decided to build a feather-light flying machine, even though I have no pilot's license and had never made anything more complex than a book case.

Joy to the world! I've finished the third draft of the Crete book, the story of my building and flying an aeroplane in Greece - as a means of travelling into the ancient myths. I plan to do a couple more edits before submitting it for publication. But don't queue up outside your local bookshop yet; it won't be published until spring 2004.

I love this stage of writing, when a book has a beginning, a middle and an end (though not necessarily in that order). For me writing a first draft is always emotional and draining (as illustrated by my consumption of gallons of Greek coffee and tea and acres of chocolate biscuits). Subsequent drafts depend more on analytical thought, hence engage the heart less (and reduce my caffeine and fast-sugar needs). By this stage a writer knows his or her book and characters. It is a time for craftsmanship, for endless revision, for - as
Flaubert wrote - prose is like hair that shines with combing.

I'd promised myself that I wouldn't write this month's letter about our son. His arrival twelve weeks ago was a blessing but one that has little relevance outside our small family circle. I may have been moved by many aspects of fatherhood, especially on parental responsibility and intuiting understanding without words. But even these lessons were not reason enough for me to write to you about him.

Until I exchanged these thoughts with another new parent, and reader, in Greece. He wrote to me in response, 'Basic communication is so ancient and deep, and comes so easy that we never expect it. For millions of years, living creatures have been communicating without speech, and they still do, much better than us who have based our communication on language. Language reaches other widths and heights in detailed expression but is not for the basic. And lies are only told. They can never be expressed otherwise.'  

It's summer and I'm now ready to sit down and relax in the garden.  Or so I'd hoped...

It's been a busy spring: completing 'Building Icarus' for Radio 4, reviewing Alain de Botton's 'The Art of Travel' for the Sunday Times, tutoring at Arvon (with an extraordinary group) and launching this website, which Noble Caledonia and amazon.co.uk associates chose as their Site-of-the-Week.
 
Of course most of my time has been spent writing the Crete book.  I finished the first draft last week: 115,074 words, some of them even spelt correctly. It's a rare thrill to hold a new manuscript in ones hand, and daunting too knowing the amount of work that remains to be done.  But it should be easier from here on.  I find writing a first draft is emotional while editing is only hard, analytical graft.  Over the next months I'll work through at least five or six drafts and - all being well - deliver the book to the publisher in early 2003.  And the publication date?  Spring 2004.
 
 

It's spring in Dorset and I've written 50,000 words of the new book. Which lifts the heart. As does the launch of this web site which has kept me busy, between keeping the fire stoked, through the winter. Web design isn't something that I've tried before, or am likely ever to tackle again, if only because a part of me lingers on in the stone age of computing. I write my books and programmes in longhand, at this desk, typing and editing each morning's scribbles on to a steam-powered Macintosh in the afternoons. The ancient Apple barely has enough memory to handle email. And if I try to open an attachment it hisses and spits like the 1907 transcontinental locomotive my father once gave my mother (more on that later).