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Saturday 22 November 2008

My brilliant career

Aidan Hartley on the Wild Life

In the summer of 1986 I got a job as a busboy in Burger King on the Champs-Elysées. I was given a funny pair of trousers, which I was ordered to wear as part of the uniform. I refused, and so later the very same day the only employment with steady prospects I’ve ever had in my life was terminated. I took to busking on the Métro with my friend Lloyd. Even after that summer ended, I stuck to busking — and to be honest I have been doing it ever since. OK, so Van Morrison tunes got dropped in favour of freelance journalism. But it’s all the same thing.

I became a war correspondent. I assumed people might take me seriously. It took a dozen conflicts, coup d’états, assassinations and sundry acts of God to conclude I was wrong. By my age, hedge-fund traders have already retired to their yachts. I, on the other hand, am still a stringer in Africa.

Poverty does not bother me so much, but it would have been nice to earn some recognition along the way. Nice, even, to be invited to do things based on my empirical knowledge that I might still turn down: to help the Tories brush up on their Africa policy; to pass information to MI6 in return for brown envelopes; to lecture female undergraduates at an American university; to boast of my bravery at dinner parties in Dorset (where I might have bought a good house with all my hefty pay). Instead, I’m still the dodgy bloke with sand in his boots.

For example, I scored a BBC radio assignment to visit Chitral, in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Rather than the hunt for Osama bin Laden, my story was about a local headmaster and his school. Still, the BBC told me a special security meeting had to be held to decide if it was safe for me to go. I was secretly pleased. It meant they cared about me. Indeed, I thought I was quite brave. Finally I was ‘green lighted’. I could just imagine what they had said at the meeting. This is one fearless journalist. ‘Well, no, actually,’ my BBC producer said. ‘They weren’t at all worried about you being killed. Since you will be recording in a school they wanted to be sure you weren’t a paedophile.’

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