Subedit anything - Good to go

Far-flung beaches, great adventures, the best pub in Bolton or a subsidy for the family holiday - whatever your inclinations, travel writing can help bring the fantasy to life if, as the how-to books say, you just go about it in the right way.

Recognise first that good travel writing is hard work. A bland re-telling of jolly holiday japes ("Diarrhoea of a Nobody") may fill pages but will probably leave the reader cold.

Do some research. One writer set himself to find out when the bells in a particular church tower had been cast so as to establish whether he could casually refer to listening to the same peal as the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Put yourself about. One definition of journalism is that it's writing down what other people say, and that applies to travel writing just as much as any other kind. Talk to waiters. Ask the local tourist board for advice. Interview people - you are, after all, trying to write like a journalist.

Check your facts. Other people following in your footsteps will be irritated if they turn up at a museum, say, on a dusty Tuesday, find it closed and realise that you could have warned them. The place is always closed on Tuesdays unless - in the kind of detail travel writers get used to handling - the preceding Monday had been a bank holiday or the second after Septuagesima, or whatever.

Work out what you are good at. One editor of a holiday magazine told me: "Some people are just wonderful writers who can capture the spirit of a place. Others are brilliant at facts, serious, comprehensive, handholding information."

Another emphasised what is gospel for anyone hoping to write for magazines and newspapers: "Please read the magazine before sending in articles or ideas. Nothing is more annoying - to us and the writer - than the waste of time involved in dealing with an article that is completely unsuitable."

However, by all means indulge your own interests. One would-be writer, just starting out, realised that her own responses to food mixed in with an upcoming holiday in Morocco ought to lead to something. The result was a piece on the street kitchens of Marrakesh's central square that made a double-page spread in the Food & Drink section of one of the quality newspapers.

Remember that travel writing is work. A writer of travel guides once told me about her 12 weeks' research for a book on the Greek islands: "Everyone around was tan and lithe. It was just me and the Greeks who were drawn and haggard and pale because we were working so hard."

Another travel writer, John Wilcock, the American author of a classic guide to Japan, says that listing prices provides sheer historical, sociological documentation. He provides another tip, pointing out that it is important to physically get around each place: "Climb to the highest point - tower, skyscraper, hilltop - to understand the physical layout."

Keep the receipts. In the long term, those prices will be of real interest to you when you look back on them after a few years but, in the short term, if you're earning enough from your writing to interest the tax people, receipts can lessen the levy. One experienced travel writer told me: "Keep all your bills - airline tickets, hotel receipts, credit card slips. They prove that you have been away and that you did pay that bill."

And brush up your writing. That may sound awful, but travel writing usually benefits from something a little more stylish than what appears on the more workaday pages of newspapers and magazines. So set yourself to pore over those purple passages.

So go - and may the going be good. Accept that the first footstep that begins a journey of a thousand miles is best accomplished by throwing yourself in at the deep end.

Humphrey Evans teaches on the one-day seminar Getting Started as a Freelance, run by the UK National Union of Journalists. One participant has put up the comment: "Probably the best course in anything I've ever been on." Look for the course outline and booking information at www.nujtraining.org.uk/page.phtml?id=1185&category=outline_pt&finds=0&string=&strand=

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box. Here you see a passageway in Beijing's Forbidden City which you can call up by putting BAFK00 in the search box.

Diarrhoea of a nobody

Travel writing has a technical vocabulary of its own. Make sure that you get to grips with the most perplexing word of all, says Humphrey Evans.

Holidays mean diarrhoea. Whether it's just one day of the runs, the squits or the trots following on from the salad of the bad cafe, or the full-blown agony of an entire cruise ship succumbing to a norovirus, the result is the same.

Someone's got to write the postcard home. Someone's got to note it down in the medical statistics. And, in the case of major outbreaks, someone's got to write the newspaper reports. All fair enough, except that no one can spell the blasted word.

For some time now, I've been teaching journalists the skills they'll need when editing other people's writing - things like spelling and grammar. I've taken to asking people on the various courses to write down the word diarrhoea before moving on to talk about dictionaries and spell checkers and other ways of getting to grips with recalcitrant words.

Of 30 participants, just three got it right, and one of those was using the American spelling. The rest were all over the place: diaarhea, diahorrea, diahiaria, diarrehia, diaorreah, diorrhea, dioherra, dihorea, diohoerria, diorherea . . . .

Presumably the problem lies in the fact that the word comes to us through late Latin from an earlier Greek formulation - Hippocrates knew a lot about diarrhoea - which means to flow through. The concept is fine. It's just that the letters go wrong because we're not used to the spelling conventions that come into play.

My own solution would be to rename the condition so that it's easier to spell. Dire Rear seems about right. It conveys the meaning while matching a much easier set of English spelling rules. It would certainly make writing the postcards easier.

Note to subs: do not run this piece through the spell checker. It just won't make sense if you do.

And real note to subs: don't delete the previous note. It is meant to be part of the article.

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.

Doing it in styli

Freelance journalists do need to tangle with the internet - and even set up their own websites - but resist over-optimistic blandishments, says Humphrey Evans.

Angela had me firmly located in the 21st century. Cold-calling, on the phone one afternoon, she told me her organisation could provide me with a self-managed website the minute I specified which of the three levels of sophistication I wanted.

When I said that I, as a freelance journalist, couldn't see the use of having my own specially-built website, she countered with an encouraging come-on: "The guys who do the demo will tell you how you can make money from your website."

I agreed that she could send me an email explaining more - although only after I'd got an assurance that there wouldn't be follow-up phone calls. She took down my email address, after I'd spelt it out, and that was that. Except it wasn't. She rang me back in about ten minutes to say the email hadn't gone through.

I didn't like to tell her that that was my experience with just about everything to do with computers and the internet. Vast promises and then the simplest things don't work. And I really didn't like to tell her that my attention that afternoon was firmly on 20th century technology, tracking down a replacement stylus for my hi-fi.

At some point in the 1970s, I replaced my Dansette record player with a proper turntable, amplifier and speakers purchased from, delivered and set up by a shop near the Finchley Road called Studio 99 at the instigation of a friend who enthused about that kind of thing.

When CDs and so on came in, I'd let the stuff go dormant but I'd never thrown it away - could you face putting a pair of polished rosewood speakers in a skip? At some stage I'd brought it back into use. I still had the records. The speakers slotted into a shelving unit; the turntable went on to a box in one corner of the room; and I discovered Oxfam.

Oxfam was where the records ended up that were being discarded by other one-time hi-fi fans. At that point you could turn up gems for 99p, although the Oxfam shop in Highgate now seems to be cashing in with a price rise to £1.99.

Some of what I've picked up has just been quality I couldn't afford the first time round - anything with the yellow blazon of Deutsche Grammophon, basically. Some of it is attractively interesting although perhaps not what you would start a record collection with - for example, Glenn Gould playing Liszt's piano transcription of Beethoven's Fifth.

And some of it just spoke to me in the way that something costing 99p does - Beethoven again, say, only this time Four Pieces for Mandolin and Harpsichord. I'm hoping against hope that the soloist, Maria Scivittaro, will turn out, despite what her name suggests, to have been born somewhere like Brussels or Antwerp just for the sheer joy of being able to describe her as a plucky little Belgian. And the record itself is a joy in any case, as jolly as anything.

But the little bit of grit in the oyster, the nagging worry, has been the stylus. What would happen when it wore out. I trekked down to Tottenham Court Road in the hope that one of the shops there could do something. The place I ended up was less a shop, more a sort of bazaar with each counter running an independent business. The guy they pointed me towards was confident, pulling out a stack of tattered catalogues, but when we looked up the names, Thorens, SuperE, nothing showed.

This was where I finally did think the internet would help, and in a way it did, although only at one remove. The turntable designation went in, Thorens TD150 MkII with TP13A tone arm, but all that showed up was a network of people swapping notes about what they were doing to keep theirs going. SuperE went in, and went nowhere. Stylus, on the other hand, brought lists, with photographs, of perhaps two hundred or so without any hint of mine.

What did show up, however, was a real shop, Musonic, in Watford, with a real telephone number, and a real young man on the end who actually knew about the SuperE. "It hasn't been made for 30 years," he told me. But he knew what to do.

"There is an E," he said. "That will fit, although it is a lower spec." I could have told him my ears were probably a lower spec than they were 30 years ago.

They had one in stock, at £27.50, which turned up the very next day by post. They've ordered another, which will come at some point. That, in the magic words of the gently aging, will probably see me out. Oh, and I probably won't be setting up a personalised website either.

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.

Novel routes to journalism

Journalists can pick up hints from anywhere. Here Humphrey Evans records his exposure to three intriguing novels written by journalists.

What do journalists know of love? Who can tell? But James Meek, who has worked as a journalist since 1985, as a freelance and for the Guardian, has just won the prize for a "literary love story" awarded by Le Prince Maurice, one of the top hotels in Mauritius.

His winning novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, whisks its love affair into being between two journalists reporting from Afghanistan at the end of 2001 in the Twin Towers aftermath. One detail stands out.

Each morning, we are told, our protagonist squats over the outhouse hole and imagines his money belt breaking and him having to retrieve it from the Marscape of ordure down there. That's not the detail. This is: "When he left London the pouch contained twelve thousand dollars."

James Meek reported for the Guardian from Afghanistan on the war against the Taliban in the autumn of 2001. Are we being told that this is what the average correspondent was toting, concealed in his, or her, trousers? That's the distraction of novels by journalists, about journalism - the temptation to look for hints about how the journalism was done.

Another novel, The Painter of Battles by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, pushes us up against another conundrum, as well as another love story. The conundrum in this case involves a war photographer caught up by the question of what responsibility he owes to the people he has photographed.

His love affair ended when his amour, another war photographer, stepped on a roadside bomb. Now, burnt-out and perhaps already looking for death, he finds himself tracked down by a former soldier featured in one of his prize-winning photographs. The soldier explains that he has come to tell him of the consequences of that exposure - in all senses - and then kill him.

Again, Arturo Pérez-Reverte has been a journalist, a war correspondent for Spanish newspapers and magazines for 20 years, and he has assured questioners that the horrors described stem from his own experiences. Again there are inconsequential details, a smiling Lebanese taxi driver, for example, to whom the photographer "was paying two dollars commission for every good photo he helped him get." Is that, indeed, how it is done?

And then a third novel, Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn, just is journalism. Gordon Burn, too, has worked for the Guardian as well as writing Happy Like Murderers about Fred and Rosemary West. Born Yesterday takes us through the journalism of 2007 - Madeleine McCann's disappearance, Gordon Brown stepping up as prime minister. And again there are these details.

At one point our narratee, the person about whom the story is being told, a writer, travels to Sedgefield for the by-election to pick Tony Blair's successor. He makes a list of items picked up from the late shop, then "next he felt he should add a description of the room where he was going to be for several nights in case at some time in the future he should need to recall the details." Is that how it is done?

Maybe it's pure coincidence that three novels by journalists which all feature journalism should come along so close together. Maybe this isn't the way they are meant to be read. But there's something to be said for finding another way of learning about journalism from people who have been doing it.

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.

Water, water everywhere

Subeditors work with other people's words so it helps to have a go at writing articles. Here Humphrey Evans records his meetings with remarkable plumbers.

My life has been measured out less in coffee spoons than by inundations. And, of course, by plumbers.

El Biggy took place by night in a mansion block where I was living in north London. The owner of the topmost flat had installed a central heating system by running an unlagged small-bore copper pipe through an unheated north-east facing attic, sweating it into the ancient lead pipe of the rising main without any intervening stopcock. There is a word for such a man: that word is architect. I'm sure all the paperwork was in order, there may even have been diagrams, but the first spell of seriously cold weather and the resulting burst pipe send a cascade down the walls of three floors of sleeping leaseholders.

The Fire Brigade hunted out an access pit in the forecourt of the block where they cranked down on a somewhat corroded stopcock. Any washer had long since perished, however, so they cranked down harder. Lead is marvellously ductile when first formed, but, over 50 or 100 years begins to crystallise. A couple of firemen heaving away may have stopped the immediate problem, but created another by cracking the pipe.

That's where I came in, because no one else seemed worried about what effect this broken pipe was having. Only when you've stood alone in a dark basement watching water seep through the brickwork and lap towards the tangled wires of 15 fuse boxes do you know what panic feels like.

The plumber I found, the one who told me about perished washers, ductility and crystallisation, was a recovering alcoholic who had once run his own building firm. After some grandiose suggestions involving a JCB, we eventually settled for running a diversionary plastic pipe around the problem, something that seemed to work.

Water always has this panicky effect on me. A stain spreading across the bedroom ceiling led to putting in a new cold water tank, although a calmer assessment might have diagnosed a condensation problem. Plumbers usually ask about the state of the roof as well, since rain getting in is more common than a leaking tank. Whatever. This plumber, tiny, bijou even, happened to be ideal for the job of fitting the largest possible tank into the smallest possible space.

It also gave us a new ballcock and valve. Ageing ballcocks stick. Usually this doesn't matter because people use enough water every day to keep things under control - but people go on holiday. This plumber told of being called to a house in Hampstead where the family had come back from three weeks abroad to find something like a small river flowing down the staircase.

Another plumber on another job, replacing a length of copper pipe leaking into a concrete kitchen floor, told me of another horror where builders who had spent months renovating and redecorating a woman's house up in Barnet offered to put up a couple of curtain tie-backs for her as one last service. Gaily they drilled into the wall, and straight into the pressurised micro-bore supplying the radiator underneath the window. By the time the plumber reached them, half the plaster on the wall was down, the carpets and the floor were sodden, and the woman was facing weeks of drying out, let along the work that had to be redone.

In comparison, my own last water wonder is nothing, a cold tap, just two years old, that suddenly stopped working. The plumber who came to look at it was an older chap, semi-retired, who sticks to these smaller jobs, replacing washers and the like. "These new taps keep me in business," he said. They're complicated - washers, O-rings, they just go." He spotted the kitchen mixer tap. "Ceramic valves," he said. "They go." And the radiators' thermostatic controls. "Rubber diaphragms," he said. "They go too. They don't tell you, but they do." A beautiful relationship looks like getting under way.

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.

Against the rub

Journalists make their mark in many ways, says Humphrey Evans. Victor Noir may have died unfortunately young, but his influence lives on.

Paris, the city that did so much to make sex part of its attractions, has sometimes found itself embarrassed by a venerable custom that might be viewed as overly lubricious. And yes, it does involve a journalist.

The scribbler in question was the 22-year-old Victor Noir, a republican-minded writer on the Parisian La Marseillaise, who was shot dead by Pierre Bonaparte, cousin of the emperor Napoleon III. Noir was, admittedly, on the non-journalistic errand of delivering a challenge to a duel on behalf of his editor, so may have fallen victim to an unfortunate mix up, but his death was taken seriously enough to set off a 100,000-strong anti-Napoleon demonstration.

His grave, in Père-Lachaise cemetery, is topped by a life-size bronze statue showing him as he fell, arms flung out, top hat rolled to one side. Life-size, and life-like. So much so that the groin area of his tight-fitting trousers noticeably features what Le Monde has described as "un membre turgescent".

From almost as soon as the statue was lowered into place - it lies virtually flat to the ground and we certainly don't want to use the word erected - women afflicted by childlessness, and other love troubles, took to seeking help by giving the protruberance a gentle rub.

Gentle though they may have been, these cumulative caresses mean that those particular few inches of bronze gleam gold against the surrounding darkness. (So too, as it happens, do the toes of his boots.) Flowers and notes of thanks are left tucked into his top hat, which suggests some level of success.

At one point municipal bureaucrats decided these surreptitious caresses offended some sense of propriety. Railings were placed around the grave and notices banned, on pain of prosecution, frottements indécents. Public reaction was so strong, however, that the railings were soon dismantled. Journalism needs its icons. Death and the maidens, indeed.

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting and freelancing at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.

Beware the lures of training

Make sure you can see how training will lead to work before you hand over your money, says Humphrey Evans.

Just at this moment, I'm torn between becoming a forklift truck driver and a business analyst. The training course for driving forklifts looks as though it might be as little as £55. Business analysis costs a heftier £500 but the ad does say "Start work immediately!" and presumably they know what they are talking about. "Become a solution provider for a range of organisations," it goes on. "This is the latest career in town."

But what about this equally seductive adjacent ad: "Retrain Now in a Growth Industry . . . become an accredited Life / Business coach." They point out that 70 per cent of all organisations use coaching, so the £997 for the course could set me up for life, a new life at that.

Once you start noticing these ads, they come at you from all directions. Door Supervision costs £125 to pick up while a CCTV course is £170. That's watching TV isn't it? I could do that.

At the other end of the fitness scale I could become a Gym instructor or a Personal Trainer. I've seen them in the local park urging people through the next set of 10 push ups or knee bends. I could do that too.

Actually, here's one I think I couldn't do - or wouldn't want to: Close Protection. The course costs £1,195 plus £55 exam fees. I don't quite know what an exam in Close Protection would entail and I'm tempted by the notion of an exotic lifestyle by proxy. But I've seen enough films to predict that one course module will be called something like "Taking a Bullet for the Client" and I suspect that's the day I'll phone in sick, regardless of what effect it has on the exam results.

So far the income possibilities have been hinted at, rather than guaranteed. But here are some that seem to take that further step.

"Urgently required," says one, "motivated people to become Plumbers and Electricians. No experience necessary as we will train you. Salaries from £17,500 to £35,000." And here's another, this one requiring motivated people to become Web Designers, again with salaries of £17,500 to £35,000 mentioned. The telephone number to ring is the same for both, and both have a line of easily overlookable type at the bottom that says: "A contribution may be required."

Another ad invites people to train for an exciting career as a self-employed Alternative Health Therapist, giving a figure of £42,000 Pt/Time OTE. If I knew what OTE meant, I'd be better able to judge the likelihood of attaining it, but that £42,000 Pt/Time certainly looks tempting.

And then an ad offering training to become an Immigration Adviser or Housing Officer reveals a possible explanation for the plethora of similar offers. "Beat Recession," it says. You've lost your job, or never had one. Cough up the training fees, you think, and suddenly a new career will be yours.

But here's one last ad, for training as a proofreader, with a headline figure of £24 an hour. This is a world I know - unlike those of forklift drivers, web developers or alternative health therapists - and I know it doesn't function like that.

What I tell people who ask me about training as a proofreader is that if they find a job or freelance work that contains an element of proofreading they can easily take in the training that will enable them to make a go of it. But it just doesn't work the other way round. You can do as much training as you like but it won't guarantee a single offer of work.

Only one real message emerges - check out the actual job market before handing over the fees for any training course. If the jobs are there, fair enough. If not, you could end up with a skill, a certificate and a vague feeling that you've wasted your money.

You can let Humphrey Evans know your thoughts about subediting and freelancing at prettygoodpics at googlemail.com

And if you want to use a photograph taken with a subeditor's sensibilities, go to www.alamy.com and put prettygoodpics into the search box.