A NEW TYPE OF TRAVEL WRITING?

Very quiet on the tourist front recently so I have been taking care of property interests (ie attacking the garden in Brixton and helping Leena with her rental flat) and doiong a little writing. I have a strong(ish) work ethic but there is neither the opportunity nor the inclination to get a conventional 9 to 5 job in the winter. There is always a little freelance work around and the post-tax earnings from, say, working in a shop at Christmas would not outstrip those of waiting for and picking up these jobs. Even if it would get me out of the house...

So how do I occupy my days? I have gone back this winter to an old interest of mine, freelance journalism. You can do it when you want and it ties in with guiding nicely. I know what is required and have the tools to do the work, ie a computer, a telpehone and an ability to write a literate sentence.

Only trouble is that I don't seem to have any success at persuading editors that what I am producing is worth publishing. Funny that - I thought it was pretty good. I have never worked full-time as a journalist/writer/hack and so have no contacts or working background in the business. It is, I think, my one career regret that I have never worked in what used to be called Fleet Street, producing readable, accurate copy under pressure on a wide variety of topics. I have never served my time in a newsroom and so I don't have the discipline and contacts of a pro. I am essentially an amateur, an outsider looking in. In tourism I have found a niche but not in journalism.

The idea was to write from the poiint of view of a tourist guide, short, snappy pieces of 600 words or so with insights on life in Britain from the point of view of a guide. Topics would include how a right wing American lady was pleasantly surprised by the NHS after she broke her arm, what the royal family means to Britain's economy, what's happening at Stonehenge, the old chestnut of tourist guiding qualifications (more interesting than it sounds).

Each piece kicks off with some aspect of a tour: "Mrs Latimer broke her arm on tour and found out about what she calls socialised medicine at first hand..." ; "the one thing you have to get right on a tour of London is the Changing of the Guard..." ; "I used to go out with a girl who could only stand a man in jeans or a suit. Trouble is a suit is too formal for guiding while jeans are too scruffy..."

Anyway, if any blog-browser is out there and is interested there are over a dozen of these pieces ready for publication. I would enjoy reading them and I feel sure that they could become a favourite site for readers. Want to find/fashion that niche. Writing is one thing, getting stuff read another...

HELPING HANDS

In most professions there is a tradition that new people entering the business get a helping hand from those already established. People remember their early days and pass on words of wisdom and cautionary tales. Sometimes thse are heeded, sometimes ignored, but the thought is there.

Sadly, this does not always happen in tourist guiding. Why? Because people are worried about work and they are afraid that newer and less or unqualified guides will undercut them and do them out of jobs. Guiding is not like surgery or the law where your skill and success are usually related to your experience and increase with age. You are dealing with people who are on holiday, are basically ignorant of what they are seeing (apart from the obvious like a view of Big Ben) and maybe are just a little credulous. In other words, they usually agree with any old rubbish you tell them. That is probably too cynical but you know what I mean. We are in the life enhancement rather than the life-saving business and people often respond more positively to the newer and fresher voice rather than the old stager who has seen (and said) it all before.

With the high cost of entrances to most places, many tours these days are panoramic ones, people sitting on a coach looking at the sights which the guide identifies and describes. There is no way of policing this and so unbadged guides abound - on the Big Bus and other tours where the operator wants to save a few pounds. Lower level guiding qualifications are coming in and work, already scarce, is disappearing into the diaries of newcomers who do not have a blue badge

The latest bete noir is the so-called 'free' walking tours set upby Sandemans, which use t-shirted students who do not charger a fee for the tours but get tips at the end, from which they have to pay Mr Sandeman his cut. This, I am told, is how lap-dancers operate: they pay to dance and feed back some of the fivers and tenners tucked into their garters to the clubowner. You can imagine how guides who have studied and worked hard to qualify for the blue badge feel about gasining the status of an exotic dancer in a seedy club filled with wel-oiled businessmen.

Yet there is little anyone can do about this. We have a tradition of free speech in Britain, even if that consists of talking rubbish (listen to some of those people at Speakers' Corner) and walking tours have never been exclusively blue badge. In fact, anyone can put on a top hat and offer Jack the Ripper walks for £5 a head. Do we really want to live in a society where a police officer can arrest you in the street for speaking to people without having the proper qualification? Let's work hard to protect our panoramic tours and our White Tower of interior guiding at certain sites (see Concentric Castles post) and leave the streets free, even if we do have to share a profession with t-shirted rippersoff with the same morals as lap dancers...

Hospitals on Holiday

had a toyur earlier this season which involved a few unscheduled hospital visits. Mrs Latimer broke her arm on the first day when waiting for the coach outside Salisbury cathedral. She was not drunk but a little unsteady on her pins and a pal of mine called my mobile to tell me that she was in a bad way. (Thanks, Paul.)

We ended up finding a hospital in Yeovil, which I had never been to before, where they patched her up her face and put her arm in a cast and a sling. I made the usual jokes about you should see the other bloke and we soldiered on with her having to miss very little of the tour.

I have a hopeless bedside manner at the best of times but I have learned to look concerned enough and to deal with the practicalities of medical care. A trip to the chemist will clear up most minor aches and pains but of course only doctors can prescribe antibiotics and do anything involving broken bones.

Call a doctor out to a hotel and you usually have a bill of £100 or more. Travel insurance will usually cover this but the NHS is still free to anyone, visitor or local, and the A & E departments are often better in an emergency, unless it is Saturday night in Glasgow when the queues are just too long. Hanging around in Yeovil on a Sunday afternoon might not be much fun but it does give people from abroad an education in what our taxes pay for.

Now I am sure Mr and Mrs Latimer, conservative Americans from Alabama, did not vote for President Obama or support his plans for “socialised medicine” as they call it in the US. It would not surprise me if they had accepted the propaganda that it was all a dark plan to introduce socialism to the land of the free and the brave. So they should have been (and, to give them credit, were) pleasantly surprised at the quality of the care they received from the doctors and nurses and the fact that it was all free. They could not have paid for it if they had wanted to.

A similar thing happened some years ago when the doctor actually came to the hotel on the Isle of Skye and gave a sedative shot to a diabetic pasenger whose blood sugar had gone right down at the end of a long day. I will never forget his wife screaming inpanic as he turned grey and then the mad dash to pull suitcases out of the coach to get to his insulin. (Why not in her handbag?) He wokle up the next morning having thought he had dozed off, the docotr accpeted a signature as payment and she could not believe that there was nothing to pay.

Now, I hardly ever get involved in politics when on tour. You need a working knowledge of the way our parliamentary system works, who is in the important offices of state and who is on the way up – and a little political gossip can occasionally for fun. Most people on tours are, frankly, pretty set in their views and past the point when they are open to new ideas. Preaching at them will only hit your tips, so I only offer an opinion if asked for it. Even then I keep my views pretty bland and mainstream (which they usually are anyway).

One of my brothers runs a hospital for he often says that they find it difficult to meet demand in the NHS because of the increasing expectations of patients and medical advances. Put simply, people who died a few decades, even years, ago now expect not to only survive but to send the bill to the taxpayer. The difficult decisions that result gave rise to the myth of the Death Panels of Britain.

Well, Mrs Latimer, you did not have to face a Death Panel and you got pretty good treatment for free. Let us hope you go home and spread the word and help to dispel a few myths now that you are back home.