Holidays from hell

Everyone thinks travel writing is a doddle. You soak up the sun for a couple of weeks and when you get home the words pour forth, dazzling the reader with wish-I-was-there images. Then you sit back and wait for the cheque to drop through the letterbox while planning your next safari or walk in the rainforest or flop on an Indian ocean beach, encouraged by bubbly travel PRs who tell you that the ‘views are breathtaking’, the food ‘to die for’ and the whole experience ‘the stuff of dreams’.

But there’s the problem. The vocabulary sucks. No form of writing is so riddled with clichés or lends itself so easily to the trite and outright banal as travel journalism. And forget a writer’s CV. I look after the travel pages at the Daily Mail and was chuffed to persuade a former Booker Prize-shortlisted author to write about his family holiday in Rome.