07/10/2008

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, extracts from the memoirs of Scottish war correspondent, Paul Harris. ‘More Thrills than Skills: A Half-life in Journalism’, is being scheduled for publication next year.

Publication of the book in America brought me the opportunity for my first ever US promotion tour as an author. I’d always fancied it as a junket since reading Gordon Williams’ brilliant book, Walk, Don’t Walk. Scots author Williams is probably best known as the writer of Straw Dogs, in turn best known as a violent 1971 movie with some rough sex involving the delectable Susan George, who is, cinematically, married to a young, effete Dustin Hoffman.

Walk Don’t Walk is, in my view, a much better book, which deals hilariously with the traumas and disappointments of an author on what he regards as a glamour trail which turns into a catalogue of everyday bitter disappointment.

I turned up in the States full of expectation. The first signs were inauspicious. It was raining stair-rods at Washington's Dulles Airport. Ever the seasoned traveller - hand baggage only – I directed the cab driver to the Falls Quality Inn Executive Hotel, as instructed by my publisher. 

“You sure?” he enquired laconically. “It ain't a quality joint.” Neither it was. It's what a friend in downtown Washington mysteriously termed “a brownbagging joint”. However, looking on the bright side, it was better - by a margin - than the Sarajevo Holiday Inn. The only problem was there was no bar, nothing to drink.

Waking with a clear head (it takes fully a minute for a confused brain to realise why) it seems a fit morning to take in some Washington sightseeing. I try to call CNN where I know presenter, Jim Clancy, from the wars in Yugoslavia but the telephone doesn’t seem to work. Something to do with no credit. It turns out that my publisher got the room free with a new credit card and there’s no account set up.

In the centre of Washington, I find there's nothing approaching a cosy neighbourhood bar.  Not at all like Cheers. In fact, no bars at all. Nothing to drink. Still, there's lunch coming up.

Lunch at the Washington Times, but there's nothing to drink. A strictly-no-alcohol zone.

In the afternoon, I decide to drop by and call on the competition, The Washington Post. This is not a social visit. Two years previously, they had commissioned me to do a feature for them on US Special Forces operating in northern Bosnia. The months had slipped into years, and a dozen unpaid statements of account, but they still had not paid me my $350. At first, the chief accountant refuses to emerge from his eyrie at the top of the building. On the telephone from reception, I say I’m not going. He says he’ll have security ‘remove me’. I say I’m being interviewed on CNN later and this is a typical case study of my fraught financial relations with the media. He comes down. Although he claims never to have heard of my invoice, he signs a declaration I have prepared promising to pay . . . They did, three months later. That’s what’s called 'a result', in freelance journalism.

Evening brings my first encounter, at the American University in Washington, with the formidable Phyllis, my publisher's publicist. A female powerhouse, I get the feeling she's used to dealing with people like me. But we have a good session with a lively panel discussing Bosnia and the media before an audience of 300 or so students, recorded for TV and radio.

Now the promised reception. Well, you see, this is university property. There's mineral water. No, there's nothing to drink. Is this the Land of the Free, or what? At this nadir of my existence, the wonderful and delightful Envira, Washington correspondent for Bosnian TV, enters my life.

She knows where there is a bar and we retire together. When I return to the so-called 'reception', Phyllis looks menacing and thrusts out an armful of books for signature.

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