My mum died when I was 18 and, two years later, my dad moved to America with my younger brother. My older brothers were at university so the family was split – and all of a sudden I didn’t have anywhere to live. I was grieving, rootless, and unsure what to do next.
An old school friend, Peter, who I’d been hitching around Cornwall with when I got the news that mum had passed away from cancer, suggested we spend the summer travelling. The idea appealed to me, so we packed our bags and headed off, starting on a hop farm in Kent, where we slept in corrugated iron sheds and picked apples and hops to earn money to fund our trip. There was a tractor trailer with a big tower on it, and I’d stand at the top of the tower with a scythe and slice through the vines, then take the hops to the oast house and lay them out to dry.
Once we had enough money, we hitchhiked to Italy, to the walled mediaeval hilltop town of Montepulciano in Tuscany, where we worked at an avant garde music festival run by a German composer. It was designed to be cheap and accessible for everybody and, the…
