Hello, well I bet all of you who follow me have been waiting with great anticipation for my next blog!? I'm going to get back into it now after having spent six months or more concentrating on my daily professional blog for Our Patch, which has been paused for the time being while they some financial issues. It's something to do with Google and their recent changes to adverts etc.
In the meanwhile I woke this morning to find a Google Alert telling me I was in the New York Times for the first time in my career! Well, my story on Vanuatu in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age was referred to in a news report in the esteemed paper and that'll do for a start. Here's the link to that story: http://nyti.ms/jxPgDT
And here's a link to the story they referred to: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/isle-of-smiles-20110518-1esua.html
The UK Sunday Times were also on the phone on Thursday morning looking for an unusual angle on Prince Philip's 90th birthday. It's funny because this is the first story in the my Herald/Age career that I've had to rewrite and so I just did a straight down the line edit of my original piece, which took the form of a letter to his Royal Highness from a devoted and obsequious Aussie Royal envoy. It was great fun writing the original but maybe it came across as a bit juvenile - at the time I was just bored of writing formulaic stories that fit a certain pattern. But if that's what they want I am determined to feed my family so I'll give it to them.
Trawling the net this morning to see if any other august publications had picked up on the story I found the piece had been reproduced about ten or twelve times without a single cent being offered or paid to its author. The most notable place in this country that it appeared was the Optus website and so I do need to find out whether they've got the right to lift stories in their entirity without paying anything.
I've been very sick and very worried over the last two weeks with something that had many malarial symptoms, mainly knocking me out completely so that getting out of bed was almost impossible. It was the most chronic fatigue I've ever experienced and made even daily tasks impossible. It mostly have gone now and could have been anything but possibly Ross River Fever caught over in WA on a recent trip - they closed down the entire town of Denmark where I was staying to spray for infectious mossies and though I don't remember getting bitten I haven't been the same since. I also got food poisoning from crayfish over there and debilitating back pain that required an injection of pain killer and anti-inflammatory from a Nurses station.
So now when I should be raring to go on a four week work trip taking in Ireland, London, Dorset, Bristol, Munich and Denmark I am a little apprehensive. Of course it's partly to do with leaving the kids behind again - they are both at such a beautiful age - Mila three months shy of four and Freya, twenty months and as cute as a frisky kitten. She's got some words happening and is a little adventurer like her Dad. Mila likes nothing more than settling her down and reading her a favourite book (from memory)...I'll stop papping on but of course it'll be hard to be away from them but I have some incredible opportunities ahead and more importantly fourteen stories at least already agreed to so it will feed us all too.
I'll report in as regularly as I can from the trip - it promises some laughs I think as well as some amazing stories - Cork's Midsummer Festival, Waterford's glass factory, Thomas Hardy's Dorset, the olympics vibe in London, my first visit to Munich and then cycling, windmills and world-class eateries in Denmark.
Really, I should be at my absolute peak as a travel writer at this stage of my career and I hope to justify that soon after a difficult few years of adjusting to being a Dad after a lifetime of doing as I pleased.
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