New Scientist  

Famine in northern Ethiopia

Filed on my return from my first trip to the country, in February 1983.
Some of my opinions have changed since then.

 

I've been back to Ethiopia several times since. Here's what I made of the situation in 1994.  Here's a report for the Guardian on a trip I made as a guest of an IT company in 2005.

On a lighter note, here's an account of a week in the life of a technology journalist I wrote for my New Scientist column in 1997. It's more or less true.  From around the same time, here's a column on the enduring enigma of consciousness.

Japan's plutonium stockpile
 
A cover feature investigating Japan's nuclear power programme, 1992, Click here to download this file

Antarctic peninsula

In 1991 I spent several months in Antarctica, reporting from the Greenpeace ship Gondwana. My colleague Pirkko Lindberg wrote a book about it, with a flattering reference to my  work ethic.

Odds and ends


Yachting Monthly

A very slow Hebridean voyage.
From Yachting Monthly, 1992.



And finally...

An account of my very first day in journalism (written long afterwards, some names have been changed).

 

More Follows...
(Originally published in Lamp & Owl magazine, 1999.)

My jeans, denim jacket and polo-neck jumper didn't impress the twin-setted ladies in the front office where the Surrey Daily Advertiser received members of the public wanting to take out classified ads, order photo reprints or horse-whip the editor. This was Guildford, 1975. But they took my word that I was the work-experience trainee, and let me through to the newsroom.

It was 10am and the room had been buzzing for about two hours. The advertiser was an afternoon paper, which meant that every morning it had to find enough news in Guildford to fill 16 broadsheet pages. As far as I could tell through the tobacco haze, the newsroom was vast. It wasn't furnished, as such, just crammed with teetering mountains of paper, presumably supported by a sub-stratum of desks. Shirt-sleeved figures hunched over typewriters or telephones. A well-bred female voice rang out.

"Good morning vicar. This is Rowena Ruttle of the Surrey Daily Advertiser. I'm telephoning about the murder of Mrs Cock."

An avuncular man in a tweed jacket introduced himself as Bob, the news editor. "You've come at a busy time, I'm afraid. We've got a murder on. Can you type? Good. Take that seat opposite Rowena and make yourself at home. I'll find you something to do."

Inconspicuously as possible, I sat down at the reporters' desk and watched Rowena and two colleagues phoning half the population of Guildford on first-name terms, while keeping up a hilarious banter among themselves. It was fascinating. My previous job had been in an aluminium foundry, where the idea of repartee was to ask the canteen lady about her underwear. Bob returned with my first assignment. "The undertaker's weekly list. Ring the next of kin and find out anything interesting about them. Number three looks good – I think he used to be mayor."

I was too horrified to quibble. Making a phone call was novelty enough. The idea of calling grieving relatives out of the blue appalled. A shortage of phone books (every newspaper office in the world suffers it) gave me a moment of grace. The only directory in view was under Rowena's elbow. When I reached for it, she hissed. Somehow, I found numbers for the first three names. I tried number one, and, after four rings, hung up.

"No reply," I wrote on the first page of my first reporter's notebook. Number two was engaged. More confidently,  I went to number three. "Guildford 4879," an elderly woman's voice answered. "Mrs Harbottle? This is...."

Dry-throated panic. Could I claim to be *of* the Surrey Daily Advertiser? Surely not, on my first day. "This is the Surrey Daily Advertiser," I improvised, slipping into funereal tone. "We're preparing an article about your late husband." Mrs Harbottle didn't hang up or burst into tears. People don't, generally. I learned that the late Mr Harbottle was not the former mayor but his brother, and had been a keen golfer.

"Write it up anyway," Bob advised. "New folio for each par, and don't forget to make two blacks." He meant put each paragraph on a separate sheet of paper, for ease of editing and to distribute among compositors to cast in hot metal type. "Blacks" were copies made with carbon paper, the pre-computer equivalent of back-ups.

My notes didn't look enough to write Mr Harbottle's tombstone, let alone his obituary. But I fed a bundle of papers and carbons into the upright Remington and carefully typed: "A former mayor of Guildford's brother has died at the age of 83" and, as I'd been taught, at the bottom of the page the words "more follows". Second folio. Albert Harbottle was a keen golfer, his widow Ethel said today. More follows.

The story ran to about five folios. I finished the last page with "ends" and took my work over to Bob. "Not bad," he nodded, flicking his Biro over my typescript. He ringed the words "more follows" so that a bloody-minded printer wouldn't set them in type, fastened the folios together with a pin and dropped the bundle into a wire tray.

Next task was a press release about the Surrey Youth Orchestra winning a national award. "Knock this down into a couple of pars, will you?"

I never went back to the undertaker's list, which I suspect was a hurdle to eliminate anyone temperamentally unsuited to reporting. Instead, my first week dissolved into a blur of outside jobs: magistrates' court cases, an achingly dull county council meeting and an attempt by a man named Feeble Knievel to leap the River Wey on a pushbike, punctuated by sessions in the Star & Garter, which the previous year had been blown up by the IRA - the advertiser's photographer was the first on the scene.

I even went out on the murder story, as sidekick to the chief reporter (who, despite spelling the victim's name three different ways in three successive editions, went on to edit News at Ten).

But the best bit was on the first day, returning from lunch – Courage Best and a Scotch egg – to see the edition arrive. The splash was the murder. Also prominent on the front page was a piece about the Earl of Onslow's cows straying onto the new M3 motorway. But there, right at the bottom, was my paragraph about the Surrey Youth Orchestra.

And, on an inside page, a little item headed "Mayor's brother dies." 

My first scoop.