The gap-year experience is laid bare in an anthology of e-mails sent home by students travelling abroad, writes Róisín Ingle
Managed to get arrested last night for "misbehaviour", but more precisely "urinating next to a lamppost". Some arsey policeman thought I was pissed. Please can you record the England football matches? Love, Angus
The above is the kind of e-mail guaranteed to strike terror into the heart of any parent who has reluctantly let their intrepid teenager out into the big bad world for a "gap year" before starting university.
Whether they are saving the world in Africa, sunbathing on every beach in Thailand or, like, checking out Cambodia, you have only their irregular e-mails to convince you of their well-being. Don't Tell Mum - Hair-raising Messages Home from Gap-Year Travellers is a compilation of such e-mails, and should prove essential reading for both worried parents and adventurous teens.
Now a first-year student at Trinity College Dublin, Emily Monk (19), was doing A-levels at her boarding school in England when she first had the idea for the book. "I was about to go off on my own gap year to work in an orphanage in Ghana, and I wanted to raise money for the school I was going to. I'd been getting all these e-mails from friends who were travelling, and my brother's friends, so I decided to put them all together with a lot of help from my Mum," she says.
Around the same time, Guardian writer Simon Hoggart was also thinking of compiling a book of gap year e-mails. He picked up Monk's self-published booklet Dear Mum for £3 at a charity fair and then contacted her with a view to putting together a more comprehensive anthology.
These days, with an internet cafe in every town, beach and jungle settlement, it's easier for backpackers to chronicle each bug-infested Honduras hostel and bus crash in India - whether or not it's the kind of thing their parents want to hear.
As you'd expect, the missives home cover everything from travel mishaps, broken hearts, drug-induced adventures, pleas for money and of course plenty of near misses. Some seem designed to tease parents: "Met a chief of a neighbouring town on Thursday. He's actually rather nice, 35, seven wives, and apparently looking for an eighth. Hope all fab, love Cat."
Others destined to terrify them: "The hostel was filled with weed-smoking, wannabe Rastas and words of wisdom (eg 'dung beetles must argue a lot') and skeletons scrawled on the walls. We were also rather gleefully informed that the dark stains in the corner were actually blood. Determined to look like we were used to this kind of hardcore-shit-man, we smiled dazedly and signed in. We'll see how it goes!"
Still others sound like they are trying a bit too hard to appease the parents: "Hey Mum and Dad, Don't fret, cos I am still alive, and you always said that was the main thing. I should probably mention that I am not pregnant. I am also not yet a heroin/coke/ecstasy/morphine addict. Neither have I killed anyone. Yesterday I saved a little boy when I thought he was drowning. I have definitely 'found myself' and also made a huge difference to the village where I am staying. I have lots of good intentions, like building wells and libraries. I have given up smoking. I have started writing poetry. I have found God. Love Tasha."
Monk says: "The gap year was good for me because I'd led such a sheltered life before, and also you get to spend a whole year doing exactly what you want," she says. "Myself and my friends who went away also look at people with much less judgment now. Before I wouldn't have come into contact with many people who weren't of the same background as I am. On a gap year you meet people from every country and now when I meet new people I am really interested in their stories. I'm excited by everyone."
Going away also gave her the confidence to go to university outside Britain. "I wanted to get out of that public school network and having travelled it wasn't as daunting as it might have been otherwise," says Monk, who has so far donated most of the five figure advance she shared with Hoggart to the orphanage in Ghana.
Don't Tell Mum: Hair-Raising Messages Home from Gap-Year Travellers, by Simon Hoggart and Emily Monk, is published by Atlantic Books