It’s been a huge burden to me for most of the past two years, but a short time ago I finally emailed the script of my new book to the publishers. And in one of my favourite places, the Café Constant in the Rue St Dominique, I’m writing this on my laptop, set between the bathtub-sized cup of café crème and the little scatter of crisp flakes where my croissant used to be.
In the past 12 months, this machine has been right round the world with me, and I have bashed out a quarter of a million words on it – not counting all the stuff I’ve written for High Life and the BBC.
So here I sit, hoping that the auspicious charm of the setting will somehow rub off on the finished product: though for the life of me I don’t know why it should. I’ve just swallowed the last drop of my coffee for luck, and pressed the ‘send’ button. In an instant, my latest book is with the publishers. As far as I’m concerned, it’s done and dusted.
I’ve even come up with a title – usually the hardest thing of the lot, in my experience. It’s Unreliable Sources, and the book is a history of British journalism in the 20th century. Will it succeed? I’m the worst person to judge. But as far as I’m concerned I’ve just achieved the only success that really matters: I’ve got the bloody thing finished.
It was a pretty big subject to bite off, I know. A history of the way the last century was reported, which had to be written while I did my day job at the BBC, wasn’t perhaps the wisest of projects to propose, but as soon as I mentioned it, the publishers liked it so much they wouldn’t forget about it.
I can’t say I’ve enjoyed the process of writing much. It took longer than I promised, and I missed a couple of deadlines, even though I crawled out of bed at 5.30am and got through at least four hours’ writing every morning. During an illicit reporting trip to the Chimanimani Mountains in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, my greatest fear was that we would be arrested and I would never see my laptop, with all my notes on it, again. Yes, of course I backed everything up, in no fewer than three different parallel ways, but I had to carry the various hard drives and memory sticks around with me everywhere. And I couldn’t email my material to myself, which is the best safeguard of all, because there was no internet access.
In China’s troubled Xinjiang province, where we soon struck up a friendship with the security cops who followed us everywhere, I explained to them about the book in case they wanted to separate me from my laptop: they were most understanding. In Basra, in southern Iraq, I sweated so much on the keyboard in the 108°F heat of my British Army cabin that I thought it might cause an electrical short. In my hotel in Tehran, I scribbled away during the gaps between the angry demonstrations about the election.
But if I didn’t enjoy the process of writing the book, I very much enjoyed the subject matter. It proved to me what I had half expected: that in spite of all the logistical and technological improvements since the days when despatches were written by hand and sent by horse to the nearest telegraph office, nothing very much about the craft of journalism has changed. The conversations between the journalists embedded with the British Army at the Battle of the Somme were similar to those between journalists embedded with the British or American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Political realities may have changed, but the basic reactions of human beings haven’t.
The heroes were the correspondents: the ones who brought to light the terrible deaths of women and children in British camps in South Africa during the Boer War, or who struggled with the censors in WWI to give some idea of the horrors of the trenches, or risked life and liberty to describe the realities of life for the Jews under the Nazis. But of course there were plenty of correspondents who were much less than heroic – who assured the British public that the deaths in the South African camps were grossly exaggerated, that conditions for our boys in the trenches were first-rate, that Britain could do with a touch of Nazi discipline and order.
The newspapers which came through the century with their reputations highest were The Telegraph and The Guardian. Both of them habitually allowed their correspondents to describe what they saw, without changing their copy to fit their editorial line. The worst… but I’m sure you’ve guessed who they were.
And now it’s time to pack up my stuff and go. I shall push the coffee bowl away, brush the croissant crumbs guiltily onto the floor, and shut down the word-processor on my book for the last time. I’ll set down my eight euros, respond to the polite goodbyes of the barman, and walk out into the Rue St Dominique. So how come, given that I’m so pleased with myself, life suddenly seems a bit empty?
John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
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