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We are not tourists We are journalists We fly out from Heathrow, Bristol, Glasgow and Newcastle to foreign airports where we are met by charming multilingual individuals employed by the holiday companies that pay for our trips They whisk away our luggage and usher us through customs, ensuring that our initial impression of their country is not of queues and body-cavity searches, but easeful efficiency They escort us around galleries, museums and examples of local industry They arrange courteous meetings with experts in many, many fields We eat eight fine meals a day, and everywhere we go we are presented with plastic bags full of information leaflets, promotional videos and the detritus of marketing: logo hats, boggle-eyed mascots, optimistic stickers   Collectively, we are treated as delegates from a distant kingdom who may – if pleased – bestow great largesse We leave behind most of our gifts, considering ourselves to be above such currying of favours We know the hospitality we want: it involves the bar We know the stories we want: they involve the authentic, the real, the colourful They must also be photogenic, accessible and easily cut-and-pastable Do you have some fun facts about the region? Do I have to write them down or are they on the press release? Could you fax that to me when I’m back in the office? Your English, by the way, is excellent   I was among them once Some of you were there too It was the last decade of the twentieth century and we could put things on expenses   *   During a five-day tour of Hungary we become furious when an elderly reporter from the Birmingham Post insists on interviewing the curator of a porcelain museum What can he possibly want to know? It’s all in the leaflets Just take the leaflets and go   ‘Rural Hungary looks like Somerset,’ says a man from The Mirror as our courtesy mini-bus trundles past thatched cottages, ‘apart from the fact that a freakishly high proportion of the population is selling paprika’   We can’t figure out the preponderance of paprika and we can’t figure out the natural mineral bathing