My professional home for the last 17 years has been a des res in the back pages of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday – and I’ve loved (almost) every moment.
I have now been put out to pasture and am left to graze on recollections of more than 40 years’ working in newspaper offices, while putting a brave face on future financial uncertainty.
One annoyance during my tenure overseeing, among other things, the travel pages has been the consensus among those who’ve never written a travel article in their lives.
All you have to do, they say, is gush about ‘sun-kissed beaches’ and the ‘succulent fried calamari washed down with a crisp local Sauvignon blanc’ – and hope the PR will invite you back for another freebie in a few years’ time.
Decent travel writing is the hardest form of journalism. No other scribing is so easily derailed by appalling clichés that ‘stretch out into the distance as far as the eye can see’.
The temptation to take refuge in facile descriptions about the ‘vodka-clear’ water and the hotel that ‘ticks all the boxes’ because of its ‘barefoot luxury’, ‘serious pampering’ or ‘food to die for’ which makes ‘time stand still’ hovers over one’s keyboard in menacing fashion.
As with any journalism – or any writing, whether it be a condolence letter or an old-fashioned thank-you letter – the intro is all-important.
Repeatedly, I have been confronted by an opening paragraph that starts with something like ‘When I told friends I was off to Sunny Beach in Bulgaria, they looked at me with raised eyebrows.’
Not only is this interminably dull but you know for sure we will later learn that those same friends were wrong to raise their eyebrows because Sunny Beach – despite its reputation for cheap booze and expensive hangovers – turned out to be far more civilised than expected.
Or, rather, proved to be ‘a hidden gem’, where you can ‘find your own slice of paradise’ because Bulgaria is ‘having a moment’.
Then there's the lazy old, old trick of quoting the taxi driver who picked you up from the airport:
‘In Antigua, we tell people they should relax as hard as they want,’ said Winston, as we headed for the ‘jaw-droppingly beautiful’ resort, ‘nestled amid cliffs’ and with ‘powder-white sand’, where you ‘wake to nothing but the sound of waves’.
Mind you, I couldn’t resist quoting the cab driver in New York as we came over the 59th Street Bridge:
‘Hey, man, you know how in some cities it feels like you’re watching a movie. Well, here, you’re in the goddam movie.’
I approach writing a travel piece as I would a news story. What’s really going on? Who’s in power? Why has the President absconded to Venezuela? One of my first tasks is to buy a newspaper to get a feel for the place as experienced by those who live there, rather than by moneyed tourists who’ve put the country on their dreaded ‘bucket list’.
A local paper might tell you church-service times or what’s on at the opera house. Both will give you a far better insight than chatting to Brian and Mary from Cheltenham at the breakfast buffet in the hotel – where, inevitably, the service is ‘attentive yet unobtrusive’ and the staff always ‘go the extra mile’ to make sure you ‘leave the modern world behind’.
I’ve been on my fair share of press trips. It’s essential to get a list of who else is going. I recall a three-nighter in Cape Town, where I was joined by a learned man from the Telegraph, a feisty woman from Grazia magazine and a young female ‘influencer’ who spent all meals photographing her food and the rest of the day photographing herself.
She was clearly in ‘selfie heaven’, except the weather was awful and she badly needed a shot of herself on the beach. Time was running out.
So, on the way to the airport, she persuaded the minibus driver to stop at the side of a road, whereupon she whipped off her dress to reveal a bikini. And we all had to wait in the bus while she posed, with the Indian Ocean in the distance, for the delectation of her ‘followers’.
I’ve nothing against name-dropping, but I’m afraid St David is banned – as in ‘this was my David Attenborough moment’. Likewise, Bear Grylls (‘Then I summoned my inner Bear Grylls’) must be discarded – along with ‘like a scene from Downton Abbey’ to describe anything remotely grand.
Write about other people rather than yourself. Watching the fat Italian in Speedos chatting up the blonde lifeguard who happens to be engaged to the windsurfing instructor is far more interesting than a dreaded ‘sundowner’ as the ‘sun sinks over the horizon’.
Italian novelist Cesare Pavese said, ‘Travelling is a brutality.’ Nonsense. It’s travel-writing that can be brutal.
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MARK PALMER'S BANNED WORDS IN TRAVEL PIECES
• Stunning
• Playground of the rich and famous
• Marmite (unless it’s the actual stuff you put on toast – never as in ‘Jeremy Corbyn is Marmite’)
• Ancient – unless it’s pre the fall of Rome
• City of contrasts
• Go the extra mile
• Azure
• Stylish accommodation
• A nightmare
• Dream
• Footprints
• Hubby
• Nothing beats seeing a lion/elephant/leopard in the wild
• Must-see and must-do
• Brits
• Whilst and amidst
• Winding, cobbled streets
• Boasting, as in a hotel boasting 24 restaurants
• Picturesque
• Breathtaking
• Brill
• Chillax
• Melting pot
• Eye-watering
• Pampering
• Blighty
• 18-30 crowd
• Airport Hell
• To-die-for
• Vibrant
• Vivid hotchpotch of colours, smells, sounds
• Summer’s lease
• Delicacies
• Teeming
• Laid-back lifestyle
• Innate sense of rhythm/calm
• Chock-a-block
• Tolkienesque, as applied to vaguely medieval defensive architecture
• Mouth-watering
• The Bounty ad
• Hearty
• Rustic
• Authentic
• En famille
• No frills
• Spa heaven
• Traditional hearty cuisine
• Whistle-stop tour
• Magical Mystery Tour
• Barefoot luxury
• Under the stars
• Alfresco dining
• Retail therapy
• Sun-drenched
• Holistic
• Back-to-nature
• Unchanging landscape
• Child-friendly – or anything friendly, for that matter, unless it is plain friendly
• Time immemorial
• Priceless treasures
• Subtropical (unless you actually mean subtropical)
• Leaving the modern world behind
• Time stands still
• My own/ your own/ our own slice of paradise
• ‘Attentive yet unobtrusive’ staff, butlers, waiters etc
• Exuberant vegetation
• Ooh-la-la!
• Par excellence
• Bygone age
• Untrammelled
• Studded (as in studded with pine trees etc), dotted, nestled or peppered
• As far as the eye can see
• Yesteryear or bygone age
• Quintessential
• At one with nature
• David Beckham
• Verdant or leafy
• Je ne sais quoi
• A-listers
• Seriously (as in seriously funny or seriously expensive etc)
• Robinson Crusoe
• Wellness
• Celebs
• Having a moment
• Game-changing
• Does what it says on the tin
• Unlocking a treasure chest of…
• The abbreviation of neighbourhood to ’hood
• Eateries
• The place that time forgot
• James Bond
• Kids
• Fashionistas
• Strictly Come
Dancing
• ‘Could be anywhere in the world’
• Offers, as in the restaurant ‘offers’ views
• Anything on tap, eg beaches on tap, sunshine on tap
• Achingly hip (or anything aching, unless it’s a genuine aching part of the body)
Mark Palmer was Travel Editor of the Daily Mail
