Of death and more.

Two days ago I dug out the black leather journal that I hadn't touched since the week my friend Pete passed away last June. For several days after his death, the pages were rapidly filled with my feverish scribbling, trying to record every memorable moment I'd spent with him...trying to capture all the details of the weekend he died. I want to make his death my book's opening chapter...It's controversial, giving outsiders a glimpse into such a raw, intimate time, and maybe readers will hate it and think that it's an extreme way of beginning a travelogue, but I think that putting the reader in the room with his suffering is an important way of honouring him, his dignity, his courage. I think it's important to show what Motor Neurone Disease did to a person, what it did to a number of interconnected lives, the impact that he had on one life.

Writing it is still difficult. The memories are still very fresh, nine months on, and when I read those frantic scribbles, I inevitably tap into the bleakness and lack of purpose, the fug of despair that I lived in the week after the death, and it sucks me in again. I can't write without crying. I can't even type this without crying. But it's important, so I will persevere.

My Rough Guides editors have been brilliant. James and Mani have both pulled strings to make sure that I'll get my advance for the Chile and Peru gig on time, and it looks like it's actually going to happen! The last time the accounts department have let me down, I got stranded in Patagonia for several days, which is why I'm anxious to have it before I go. Not excited about the travels yet, even though I've been going through the two chapters, highlighting parts: red for cutting, purple for rewriting, lime green for regular updating. Still need to decide whether I'm going to Easter Island straight away or whether I should do the south of Chile first, before hitting the tropics as a pre-Peru treat...