I'm super excited because I've been trying to get Ben to do this for a while, but he's been busy writing and flouncing about Europe (and being a Daddy in Brighton, of course). So here it is, the Ben Hatch interview.
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| Mr Hatch and his famous hair |
Hello Ben. For those people out there who don't know and love you, tell us a bit about your background and how you became a writer?
I spent years messing around in various jobs – postman, recruitment consultant, unemployment benefits worker, insurance salesman, lawnmower salesman. I worked in a video shop, a bank. I set myself up as a private detective for a while and I was a painter and decorator. Then I became a journalist. It was 1997. I was 28 and a reporter on the Leicester Mercury newspaper. It was a job I enjoyed. It was great fun. It taught me how the world was run. I loved the people I worked with and I had a girlfriend I was thinking of asking to marry me.
Then my mum died of cancer and everything blew up. Within the space of three weeks I’d been to her funeral, my girlfriend had left me, I’d quit my job, moved to London and I was homeless and sleeping on the floor of friends’ houses. It felt important to make something positive come out of my mum’s death so I decided to write a novel; to do something that would have made her proud of me. The novel took a year to write. I sent it off to literary agents the day before I left the country to go backpacking, using up the last of the money my mum left me on a round-the-world ticket. I didn’t want to be around for the rejection letters. I’d been gone 6 months and was just preparing to beg for my old job back when the very last agent I’d sent the book to contacted me. I was sitting in an internet café in Thailand. It had a mud floor. The email was from an agent at Curtis Brown. He liked the book and wanted to sign me up.
Did you always want to write travel books or was that something you just fell in to?
It was an accident. My wife Dinah’s a travel journalist and was commissioned by Frommers, a US publisher, to write a guidebook about family-friendly attractions in Britain. My son was one at the time. There was some debate about whether we should go. I wanted to. Dinah wasn’t sure. She was still breastfeeding at the time. Anyway I arranged this massive five-month itinerary and persuaded her that it was the chance of a lifetime. So we went. At that time I was a stay-at-home dad. I’d had novels published a few years before but Dinah’s job was the more secure one so I’d abandoned the writing to look after the kids. It was an incredible trip. All sorts happened. My daughter was almost blown up in a field of live ordnance in Otterburn. I wrote the car off. My dad died. Yet despite all that it was one of the happiest times of my life because my family were altogether on this adventure. When we got back from the road-trip Dinah was swamped with work. Phoebe started school and Charlie nursery so I had more time. Basically I stole the guidebook commission from Dinah and wrote it myself. Then a couple of year’s after this someone suggested it might make a good travelogue, the story behind writing the guidebook. It had never occurred to me. That’s how I came to write Are We Nearly There Yet? The follow up Road to Rouen, which has just been published, is about a similar 10,000 mile road-trip round France. If anything even more went wrong on that trip from crazed donkeys to weird Americans claiming to be soup barons and a death-cult obsessed with aliens.
Obviously The Road to Rouen is a very personal book. Were there any things from the trip you either couldn't or weren't allowed to put into the book?
It’s partly about our marriage. My wife is amazingly tolerant and easy going which is very lucky for me. From my point of view when I write a non-fiction book the way I get around the embarrassment of imagining people reading about intimate moments is to believe that the book will never be published. It’s only the day before it hits bookshops generally that I start to panic about things I’ve written. My wife reads my books first and it can be a tense time. There’s always the odd thing she will bridle at (“You cannot say that about a sexual pulley system!”) But normally she’s Ok.
What's next up for Ben Hatch and anymore family holidays planned?
There are a few things on the horizon. I’ve just completed a sitcom treatment for my first novel The Lawnmower Celebrity for BBC3 that I’m hoping will lead to a script commission. Look at me using the word treatment there! Are We Nearly There Yet? has been optioned by Island Pictures so I’m hoping that gets made into a movie. And this summer we’re off to Italy on another road-trip. I have tried as always to minimise the chaos although there are already a few activities I can imagine tripping us up – truffle hunting in the middle of the night with dogs on an Umbrian mountain top, for example.
One last thing, as I have two young kids myself, any tips for travelling with children?
1) Always carry treats. Travelling with children minus treats is like walking through a vampire-infested grave-yard after midnight without a wooden stake. You might survive, but why take the chance?
2) Enthuse your kids about where you’re going. Although never oversell the destination as we did in the Auvergne region walking inside the crater of the strombolian volcano Lemptegy, where instead of learning about the awesome power of nature and fragility of our world that we’d talked up to the kids, we were shown a video about pouzzolane – a porous volcanic rock useful in road surfacing. It turned out our kids weren’t that interested in road surfacing.
Thanks so much to Ben for giving me an interview. Ben is truly a very funny man and a brilliant writer. I urge you all to stop reading this right away and get Ben's books forthwith. I have even included some handy links below.
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| Ben's brilliant trek around Britain |
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| Ben's equally brilliant trek around France |
Until next time.
Hugs,
Jon X
