Preview: for publication in 2012

Travels with My Hat is the memoir of an Australian nurse who through skill and determination, switched careers to become an award-winning travel writer and photographer. It is a colourful record of her experiences defined by travel, undertaken on her own initiative, often without official help, and frequently against all odds. “We don’t know who you are,” she was told by the travel editor of the Daily Telegraph on arriving in London in 1974. “To get a name here, you need to write a book.” Which is exactly what she did. Publication of The Gulf States and Oman in 1977 brought a deluge of commissions on the Middle East. Books followed on Jordan and Pakistan. Christine was invited to visit Iraq by the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein. Since visas were not issued to British journalists, she returned home and obtained clearance from the Iraqi Vice-Consul in – of all places –Bondi! Her journeys to Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan and Morocco are rounded off with letters to her mother who had never left Australia. We join Christine avoiding bandits in Yemen, diving in the Red Sea, and dining with Arab sheikhs in a racy account of forty years of travels when only one of a thousand and one problems, was being a young, western woman working in a man’s world. I have occasionally wished I were a boy, she writes in a chapter on Yemen. Not for the penis per se, but for the freedom it allows a man, since reality for a woman traveller is that her sex presents constraints…

Photos by Christine Osborne

www.copix.co.uk

http://travelswithmyhat.com

Experience, travel and

DELICIOUS CASSOULET FROM THE OSBORNE KITCHEN

PORK AND BEAN CASSOULET: serves 2

500 grm roughly chopped shoulder of pork

1 large onion sliced

3 large cloves garlic

1 green chilli chopped

I 300 grm tin chopped tomatoes

2 medium chorizo sausages

1 500 grm tin white flageolet beans

Cup of chicken stock/other

I tbsp hot Cajun sauce

Add cooking oil to a pan and gently colour the garlic, onion, chilli with the addition of a good pinch of allspice and cumin.

Remove and add the pork pieces, tossing in the hot oil until juices are sealed. Remove.

In an earthenware casserole, tip the pre-cooked flageolet beans, the skinned and chopped chorizos and the pork. Add the tomatoes and juice, the stock, several slurps of Cajun sauce and a squeeze of fresh lemon-juice.

Cook on a medium heat for 2 hours, stirring occasionally.

Serve with khubz Arab bread, or crusty baguette for dipping in the sauce, and a green salad of lettuce, cucumber, pre-cooked and chopped string beans and slices of avocado.