The editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, Robin Morgan, asked me if I’d be interested in doing a feature about a famine in Sudan. Sure, I said. “I mean going to South Sudan and reporting,” he said. South Sudan, where there’s a civil war and the Janjaweed murderous Arab Muslim militia terrorize civilians and where there’s now a famine? “Yes,” said Robin, “that’s the one.” Paul Lowe, a photographer who’d worked in the Balkans and Chechnya, had arranged to travel with Médecins Sans Frontières; they needed someone to do the words. I’d never done anything like this. Not any proper reporting. Certainly not disasters or war. I was immediately overwhelmed by that old school feeling that I was bound to fail, and I examined in ever more graphic detail all the things that could, and therefore would, undoubtedly go wrong. I changed my mind daily. What settled it was a note I got from an editor on another section, seriously cautioning me: “Potentially you’ve got a good and long career on this paper, but you will be jeopardizing both your reputation and the reputation of The Sunday Times if you agree to go to Sudan. Sending a food critic to cover a famine was the most tasteless, embarrassing and ridiculous idea.” So I called Robin and said I’d do it.

I was supposed to pick up my visa from the rebel SLA, Sudan Liberation Army, at their consulate in Nairobi—except nobody was at their consulate. I was hitching a lift into Sudan with ITN, the Independent Television Network, via Lokichogio, an extraordinary Bond-like landing strip in the desert of northern Kenya with a runway that jumbo jets can land on, surrounded by huge warehouses full of grain and rice, blankets and tents. I didn’t have the visa and so I didn’t take my passport. Traveling across borders without a passport isn’t a great idea at the best of times. MSF said if the SLA weren’t in the refugee camp, I’d probably be okay, we’d be there for only a couple of days. We flew in a little Cessna Caravan prop plane—it took hours. We landed on a strip in the bush and ran into a pothole. The ITN crew got out and said there were soldiers at the end of the runway; my MSF minder said she couldn’t be associated with me because it might jeopardize their work. The Dutch pilot said that if I lay down in the back of the plane, he’d fly me back to Loki and I’d be able to hitch a lift to Nairobi in a couple of days. The thought of the long trip back to London without a story was worse than facing the guerrillas, so I got out with Paul and marched up through the bush to a little clearing that passed as an arrivals lounge, and there was a table, behind which sat a rebel general, flanked by his soldiers casually armed with pistols, Kalashnikovs, machetes and cattle whips as an unnecessary symbol of authority. They all wore shades and obsidian faces of stony hostility . . . I remember one had a baseball cap that said “Men in Black.” The general watched me approach, I beamed at him. Hello, I’m Adrian Gill from The Sunday Times in London. I passed over my press card. I’ve come all this way to tell your story—we’re desperately concerned to know how everything’s going. He looked at me for a moment, smiled with a comical lack of front teeth, handed me back my card and said, “You’re very welcome.” He could spare only a few minutes, but his men would offer any assistance I needed—but I must be careful, there was a war on, you know, and there were some bad people abroad. It was a relief of enormous proportions. Possibly the greatest relief I’ve ever felt in my life. The ground seemed to fall away; as I walked back down the runway I was completely weightless. Suddenly I could smell and hear again: in the distance the little Caravan revved its engines for takeoff.

We got to a small MSF feeding center and sat round the campfire, eating sandwiches we’d put in our pockets in Nairobi. The news crew opened bottles of Scotch and told war stories, and around us in the dark a million starving Dinka tried to sleep. I felt chokingly ecstatic. To be in this place with this stomach-twisting, angry story: I knew beyond doubt that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Nothing else could be as completely enfolding and compelling and in the moment as this. Following the scene, the sound and the skein of a tragic story, everything I’d ever looked for in drink and drugs, and all the barmy pockets of displacement activity that came with them, was here in concentration, so intense, so clear, that there was nothing else.

I got back. The story didn’t quite write itself, but the narrative of it and the images were so clear and bold that it was an arrangement rather than a construction, and Paul’s pictures were an unwavering accompaniment. It worked. Another editor passed me in a corridor and without looking up said, “Turns out that a restaurant critic is exactly the person to send to a famine.”

I have a bad reputation among photographers. They can be monumental Day-Glo knobs who insist on taking pictures for stories that are not going to be written and who show disdain for the one that is; who think that I’m there to write their picture captions; who want to come back to a place at five because the light will be much better then, when we’re never coming back here ever again; who want to spend an hour arranging the old man and the schoolgirl in front of the temple; and more to the spiky end of the point . . . it’s photographers who get you killed. Nothing alters the atmosphere like a demanding, oblivious snapper dressed in semi-military fatigues, strung about with kit bags, pointing long lenses into people’s faces, shouting: “. . . ignore me. No, no . . . look down . . . Just do what you were doing.” They believe their cameras are the amulets of protection. Their role model is invariably the war photographer Robert Capa, who said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” They all quote that. Just after he said it, he stepped on a landmine. They are driven by competition and envy much more than writers are; a newsworthy image can make them a small fortune, but generally they’re paid very little and there are dozens of wannabe Don McCullins hitching into war zones, blithely insouciant to the risks they are taking with themselves and those who travel with them. And now that everyone has a camera in their pocket and everything’s being photographed all the time, they feel the pressure. More photographs will be taken this year than in the whole history of photography—and they’re all online. It’s tough for photographers. Though I wish more of them knew Capa’s more profound observation: “The pictures are there, all you do is take them.”

Despite my reputation for being unforgiving and unhelpful to photographers, traveling with them has been the most fun and some of the most intense work I’ve had. I’ve made close friendships, sometimes just for days, sometimes for life, and the most rewarding professional times have all been shared with a monkey. Journalists call them “monkeys” because they’re always climbing up things, and you really don’t want to eat opposite one. Paul Lowe and I went on to do stories on drug-resistant TB and the Aral Sea, and I worked with the marvelously Eeyore-ish Peter Marlow, president of Magnum. He shot a fantastic set in Peshawar and then an equally astringent story in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. He brought a Rolleiflex camera that you keep on your chest as you look down into reflecting mirrors. It’s slow and it shoots only a handful of frames. The film doesn’t have sprockets, and he was constantly loading and unloading it. Why did you bring that ridiculous camera? I asked. “Well, when you take pictures in countries that were Communist and that had the secret police, people are very nervous of cameras pointed at them by strangers. A Rolleiflex would never be used by the KGB.” It was such a thoughtful consideration, I never complained again. Peter stopped coming on jobs with me when he got fed up taking my picture. We did one story with Jeremy Clarkson where Peter ended up running up and down a gay beach in Mykonos snapping naked men. It was a low point in his Magnum career.

Jeremy and I had an even worse reputation with photographers. In Reykjavík, our monkey got into a fight with a fisherman in a bar. Jeremy and I discussed whether professional camaraderie demanded that we get involved, but decided that we were in fact in different professions and were excused fights with Vikings. The monkey was decked and thrown out. The next morning at breakfast, he appeared with a thick lip and asked if we’d picked up his camera bag. Yes, I said, here it is. “Oh thank God,” he said. “And the lens bag?” What lens bag?

I did a couple of African jobs with Tom Stoddart—two kilometers down a gold mine on a newly blown face that was four feet high, where the rock was too hot to touch and had been formed when the sky was still red. He lit the portrait of me, directing the miners with their headlamps. It’s a good picture. I look terrified. And the story in Uganda about an epidemic of sleeping sickness spread by migration and refugees. Tom showed me that if you’re taking pictures of sick people in bed, you should never stand over them, but always get down to their level. “It’s wrong to take a godlike stance over suffering,” he said. “It’s colonial.” Tom doesn’t say much, but what he does say is usually written by a Methodist sign writer outside a chapel. There was only one modern drug to treat sleeping sickness—a disease whose name belies the vileness of its contamination. It’s correctly known as HAT—human African trypanosomiasis. The pharmaceutical company that made it was going to stop because people who catch sleeping sickness can rarely pay for expensive drugs, but it wasn’t going to waste, they were going to rebrand it as a cosmetic depilatory for Hispanic women. It was a story of hideously impotent furious tears. I wrote it. Tom’s pictures showed it. And we had the familiar default feeling of crusading journalism, which is shouting into a prevailing wind that whips the words away into the roar of traffic. But a friend, Christiane Amanpour, the CNN reporter, read the piece on an airplane and turned it into a documentary segment for American news . . . and the pharmaceutical company had a change of heart and decided they could continue manufacturing it after all. That’s the power of broadcast news. But also a reminder that most stories still originate in print.

I did a couple of jobs with Harriet Logan—cataract operations and river blindness in Ghana, and the war in Iraq. She was idiotically cool when we were rocketed in a small helicopter and she filmed a race that Clarkson and I had in American Abrams tanks along the Boulevard of Martyrs in Baghdad, the street with the great crossed scimitars—you can see it on YouTube. I won. And one with the marvelously named Gigi Cohen, the most terrifying job, during a coup in Haiti. She continued to take pictures while a teenager was shot to death in a gang fight in front of us and fought a riot policeman for her camera.

I once did a job at a country fair with Don McCullin. He made an evocative book about the English countryside when he was back from the wars. He’s dry and funny and shoots only in black-and-white and never with flash. We had dinner afterward and he told a lot of hair-raising and chillingly dangerous war stories. He’s a lugubrious raconteur, always being blown up and shot, left behind, threatened. He paused every so often to ask if there was garlic in this because he didn’t think it agreed with him . . . and was I sure this mushroom wasn’t poisonous, as if his plate were a booby-trapped paddy field in Da Nang.

Snowdon—old people and fancy bantams. You could never accuse him of snobbery: he treated them both exactly the same. I’m very fond of Tony, but he could be a bugger just for the devilment of it. Rena Effendi came to Congo and the Bekaa Valley. She was a brilliantly sympathetic photographer, particularly with traumatized and vulnerable women. She used a Hasselblad and spoke gently and encouragingly to Congolese women who had seen their families murdered and been taken as sex slaves and war-booty wives; and a gentle, haunted woman who had lived a solitary life at the edge of a village. Her husband had died in her arms, and the Lord’s Resistance Army had cut off her lips with a machete. “They fell into my lap like a doughnut,” she said.

The photographer I’ve worked with most often is Tom Craig. I’ve lost track of how many trips we’ve made, from being dug out of a blizzard in Arctic Spitsbergen to being hunted in a nighttime forest by a fossa in Madagascar, from Calcutta to Lampedusa, from Tasmania to the Towton battlefield in Yorkshire. We go easily together and have a rhythm and a routine—his obsessive packing, my obsessive earliness. We understand closely how the other works and talk constantly about stories as they take shape, like a box made by two carpenters. Tom held an exhibition of photos from the stories we’d done together where my words really were reduced to picture captions. Our first one was to Chad and was part of a book project he was doing with MSF to accompany writers to troubled places. We were going to see more Sudanese refugees, this time from Darfur, and it was on this trip that I had the best drink I’ve ever swallowed. We had to make a long drive across the Sahara, it was the hottest thing I’ve ever experienced. The thermometer broke at 56 degrees—Celsius. We were in a truck, and after an hour I discovered that the water in my bottle was sour and Tom’s bottle was empty. By the time we got to a smugglers’ town that straddled the border, we were deliriously parched. We were dropped at an emergency clinic, which was a couple of hammocks in a ruined house with a generator that ran a fridge. We were greeted by a nurse of preternatural beauty—we may have just been in the sun too long, but she really was gorgeous—who said, “I’m not allowed to keep anything but medicine in the fridge, but I knew you had a long trip, so I snuck in two bottles of Fanta. Don’t tell anyone.” I have never swallowed anything that tasted quite so wonderful.

Over the years I’ve been drawn to stories about refugees, moved by their bravery, their stoicism, their sorrow, their precious ambitions and their stories. Refugee journeys are so monumental and so mundane in a world where the rest of us just get on a plane and go to sleep. What they want would count as small failures to us; the treks are more parlous and tougher, more extraordinary than any that First World adventurers and charity explorers take on. The danger and the desperate fear of the odysseys that Eritrean teenagers escaping lifelong conscription make is barely conceivable for any European. The forced movement of people around the world, the push of intolerance, starvation and murder and the pull of work, education, opportunity and safety is becoming the leitmotif at the beginning of this new century. I know it is a story that will never stop being what I want to write about. I’m not entirely sure why, of all the compelling and exotic and exciting stories in the world, this one sticks with me. But these things are never accidental. There is some hint of kindred empathy, no similarity, but there is something I identify with . . . perhaps it’s to do with Nick’s disappearance, perhaps it’s just First World guilt? I wrote in the first Sudanese article that “it wasn’t staring into the face of starvation that thuds like a blow to your heart, it is having starvation stare back at you,” and that is still the truth that has been tested and remains. Tom and I covered the wreckage that washes up around the island of Lampedusa, and I wrote then that if you would come face-to-face with these people, you would never turn them away. You could not but help them. We all of us strive to be good, to be decent, to do the right thing. It is only their anonymity that allows us to support policies that turn our back on them, send them away, bury them in internment camps and embargoes. It is perfectly simple—if you were confronted with their humanity, then simultaneously you would be confronted with your own. I want to write that over and over and over again. And then I made a porn movie.

Hot House Tales was commissioned in a week and written over a weekend, and a fortnight later I was in the suburbs of Los Angeles on a set directing actors—exhibitionist sportsmen rather—on the best angle to have a threesome and how to remember their lines. “Hey, Adrian, could he fuck me in the anal here?” I don’t know. Do you think your character would do that? “Yeah, I think she would. Definitely she would.” Okay, well, let’s try it your way. I am the only auteur in the history of old pre-Internet porn who actually used his own name on the credits. I took Nicola and a photographer whose name I forget, who was so timidly disgusted he could barely open his eyes, and turned his head away to click and then gave up altogether and sat in his motel watching the Disney Channel as a spiritual antidote. I, on the other free hand, laughed more than I have ever laughed on any story. Dangerous, weeping laughter. I had a cameraman who had a phobic fear of sperm and my male star was Ron Jeremy, a properly funny man with his clothes on, hysterically repellent with them off. The porn stars were very funny—sometimes intentionally. They were also sweet, stupid, pneumatic and very nice to each other. It’s amazing how fast you can get used to having conversations with men who are lazily tugging at themselves to maintain their professional standing. The only uncircumcised member of the cast belonged to an energetic English actor whose specialty was cunnilingus. They called him the Hummingbird. Over a long frenetic career, he had actually managed to wear a hole in his foreskin—well, you just had to laugh. It was a singular story, so freighted with preconceptions, nothing was what I thought it was going to be. Things I thought would disgust and offend turned out to be hilarious and touching, stuff I thought would be fun and erotic was awkward and clumsy and sad and it put me off ever watching pornography for amusement or relief. “You know something?” the fat, hairy, gnarly-knobbed Ron said to me prophetically. “You are going to be the last generation that wanks from memory. I do it for money.”

Foreign correspondents are an odd lot. They drink and fornicate as self-medication. They’re twitchy and prone to be mawkish and maudlin; they’re self-deprecating but rarely cynical, always parking the anger somewhere where it won’t get out and lacerate someone. They also suffer from print shell-shock—a sort of hacks’ PTSD—paper traumatic stress disorder, an awkward itchiness in safe places, a yearning to be back in some bit of blasted world, a crawling feeling that safe and rich isn’t normal. I’m not one of them, I don’t suffer from it. I don’t have the commitment or the thousand-yard stare. I do too many five-star hotels and five-course dinners. I’m a disaster tourist. But I do like hanging around them. Whilst they’re secretive and judgmental in print, they are collaborative and helpful on the job. Being in a hacks’ hotel in a disaster is contrarily brilliant; the stories throw everything into relief. There is the fraternity of inquiry and mutual concern—people share logistics and information and look out for one another (with one or two notorious and despised exceptions). It is in those moments that you’re completely aware of life and purpose. Foreign correspondent is the most unequivocally pure form of journalism. It is going out over the horizon to catch the news and bring it home.

I don’t suffer the print trauma, but over the years I’ve been aware of something else—the uncanny presence of parallel lives. I did a story with Tom about the Forest of Dean . . . a strange place on the edge of England. We went deep into the wood with the Wicca people, witches, to find an ancient magic tree. While he snapped, I walked off on my own for a spell. The wood was silent and still. It wore its great age and the accumulation of seasons with a shimmering gravitas. I had a prickling feeling that I wasn’t alone. I walked down a deer track convinced that something or someone was shadowing me in parallel. After a bit the path came to a clearing, an afternoon sunlit meadow. I stopped in the shadows beside a humpy beech. From the other side of the tree stepped a large, glossy dog fox. He walked unconcerned into the sunlight, glowing like burnished copper, and paused to look back at me from a few yards, unafraid, with an expression that was searching and potent and full of deep zoomorphism. Then he trotted on across the meadow and into the shadows on the other side. And I walked back and told the witch. She grinned and said, “Of course. I knew you’d meet your familiar. Your companion creature. You have a sensitivity for these things, a strong empathy.” That feeling of solitary travel but of not being alone, of lives moving beside you, just out of sight, is insistent and strong. Over the years I’ve met and worked with dozens . . . hundreds of people. We form intense connections because of what we’re doing. It’s very concentrated. The places and experiences are raw and exciting—often terrifying. The meetings are only for a short time, merely in passing, and they are never repeated. We exchange numbers and addresses and fraternal hugs, but we know as we wave from the departure gate that we will never meet again. These encounters are like brushing through fields of lilies: the stamens leave indelible trails of pollen, they strike me with a sweetness of something, an encounter, shared experiences. These memories and characters from the back of stories are as acute as the smell of wreaths and garlands; I lie awake at night and wonder about them, walking their lives just out of sight in the ancient glabrous dark, oblivious—maybe not oblivious. It’s communing with auras, shades, living ghosts . . . A bar girl in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad who asked to see my passport and held it to her nose. Closing her eyes she sighed: “Ah, the smell of freedom.” . . . The Tanzanian Masai herdsman who escorted me through the bush at dusk with his red toga and broad-bladed buffalo spear because the lions were hunting. We’d been drinking warm cows’ blood in his kraal. “I’m not only a cattle farmer,” he said, “I’m an English teacher as well. Do you know the works of James Hadley Chase?” . . . The Afghan mujahideen fighter I came upon in a narrow street in Peshawar—I caught his pale, fierce eye as he strode purposefully toward me. I knew there was something wrong; this was the beginning of the Afghan war, the RAF were bombing Kabul. As we drew parallel, he darted and grabbed me, slamming me against a wall. I tensed for the feeling of the cold steel between my ribs and stared into the impervious raptor face. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the rim of a cartwheel passing within inches of my head. He had just saved my life. But he knew what I was thinking . . . he let me go, took a step back, and touched his heart with his right hand . . .

The beautiful Sudanese refugee who had lost her family, whose husband was dead and who had just given birth to twins—little boys, perfect, healthy. They lay one on each side of her in the iron hospital bed, silent. She didn’t look at them or touch them, just stared at something invisible in the distance with the blank face of stoic Africa. She refused to feed them, wishing her only children dead rather than having to struggle in the meager, miserable, damned world she had to offer them. The nurses and doctors begged and implored and prayed for her to pick up her children, but she wouldn’t. Unable to kill or to give life, she hung on the wire of untenable choices, her bright nightdress wet with milk . . .

My Japanese interpreter in a restaurant. I asked him to teach me Japanese table manners. “No need,” he said. I insisted. “No, no, really . . . No need.” Please. “I couldn’t.” Look, I insisted, it’s my job, I need to know. “No,” he said emphatically. “I couldn’t. I can’t. You wouldn’t understand. We have all”—he waved at the rest of the diners—“agreed not to notice you. We don’t see your clumsiness and ugliness. It is like the paper walls, we hear but we don’t listen. We look but we don’t see.” . . . The creative writing lecturer in a bookshop in Santa Barbara who’d written a “how to write” book called Let the Crazy Child Write! and who said, “We each are three people—a head editor, a heart writer and a crazy child. The crazy child says, Imagine a three-legged dog, and then says, Imagine a three-legged dog running. You can’t, can you? You can’t imagine a three-legged dog running? Isn’t that great?” It was like an insistent pop tune. I couldn’t imagine anything but a three-legged dog running, round and round, yapping, “Isn’t it great, isn’t it great.” . . .

The boy who sidled up to me in the lobby of the Hotel Nacional in Havana and asked if I wanted to buy a bootleg tape of Cuban music with “Guantanamera,” the much-derided and -repeated folk song whose lyrics were written by José Martí, an exiled journalist and poet, an agrarian communist, one of the founders of the revolutionary movement to free Cuba. He invaded the country in a hopelessly romantic gesture and died trying to storm a police station. But his writing was the basis of the Cuban revolution, and the words of “Guantanamera” are beautiful and elegiac and sad, and in Havana as insistent as a three-legged dog. I didn’t want the tape, but I asked the boy if he would like dinner and to tell me about his life here. He’d never eaten a steak before. All his school friends had piled onto an oil drum raft during the small window that a petulant Castro had offered to people who wanted to leave Cuba to get to Florida, ninety miles away. The boy had got as far as the shore, but didn’t go with them because he lost his nerve and worried about his mother. “It was the worst decision of my life,” he said. Now he spent hours on his bed feeling his life drift away and listened to American radio and dreamed about the parallel existence that might have been his in America. “I know all the state capitals, really all of them. I look at the map every night and plan the journeys I will make.” Okay, New York? “Albany.” California? “Sacramento.” Kansas? “Topeka.” Delaware? “Dover.” Alaska? “Juneau.” Kentucky? “Frankfort.” . . .

A hunter who after a long trek through the bush said, “I bet you can’t hit that baboon from here.” The one reading the paper? “Yep.” . . . The Rohingya refugee who had been in a camp in Bangladesh for twenty years, whom Burma had made stateless, gently unwrapping a handkerchief that contained the frail slips and frayed and folded slithers of paper—letters, passes, bills—that were the only things that proved he’d ever existed. “Someone,” he said, “has written my name. There is a government stamp. I was a person. When I die, someone will have to write down that they buried me,” and he wept, the tears falling on the delicate faint leaves of an invisible life . . . And the very chic blond guide in Reykjavík when I was doing a story about the banking collapse. She was diligent, direct, efficient and had strong opinions. At the end of the trip I paid her and thanked her. She put the cash in her pocket, looked at me and said in a loud, clear, singsong Scandi accent, “You know you’re a cunt?” Tom laughed so much I thought he’d wet himself.

The last of the things I like about journalism is that it is ephemeral. We write for deadlines, not posterity. Both our triumphs and pratfalls are lining the parrot’s cage by Wednesday, and no one remembers journalists. Our bylines pass with the news. Name five famous dead hacks? They’re all likely to be memorable for something else—Kipling, Twain, Dickens, Hemingway, H. M. Stanley, Mussolini. We look, we write, we file and depart, leaving nothing much behind. Andreas Whittam Smith, the first editor of The Independent, said that journalism was a trade not a profession (except in America, where they call themselves “men of letters”). We are like monumental masons working on medieval cathedrals; we carve our gargoyles and inscriptions and then we vanish, but the church remains—what it stands for, its litany, its service, its round of reading and commenting—while the men who made and maintained it are dust. I find that comforting.