Guiding coach parties around Europe has given Rob Sissons a lot of happy memories and it also inspired his first book.
But it was the headaches, hold-ups and downsides of foreign travel, rather than its joys, that spawned A Coach Load of Chaos.
The story follows William, a tour manager who is offered the chance to fill 10 complimentary spaces on his next tour. Instead of inviting friends or family, he hits upon the perfect way to wreak revenge on his childhood bullies.
“I had done quite a lot of work for small companies running cheap holidays, often in the outskirts of big cities,” Sissons, 50, said.
“Breakfast would not be very good, nor the coach, and there would be problems. I suddenly thought that if I really wanted to get my own back on someone, I could send them on a bad coach tour.”
He has had his fair share of bad experiences while on the road, including the time he took a group of devout Catholics to Lourdes in the south of France. They were booked into a terrible hotel, where Sissons caught the staff pouring cheap wine into an expensive bottle.
“I told the group to ask for wine bottles to be opened at the table,” he said. “The attitude of the staff was horrific.”
Sissons, who lives in Sandgate, had a yearning to travel from a young age.
“I saw the 1969 comedy film, If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium, and I thought I’d like to do that,” he said. “One day I just saw it advertised on a jobs board at university and it was my first job.”
He did the job full time for six years from 1981, touring mostly in France and Spain, and he has also been to China, South America and the USA. Sissons works mainly as a writer for Saga travel magazines now, but still occasionally acts as a rep and has just returned from a trip to Jordan.
He attended school in Great Chart, near Ashford, but stresses that none of the characters in A Coach Load of Chaos are
modelled on his own childhood ‘friends’.
“One or two things are based on genuine incidents,” he said. “My brother read it and thought it was based on him, but it’s not.
People say if you really base a character on someone, when they read it they’ll never recognise themselves. I was bullied a bit
as a child but I don’t know
them now, so I couldn’t write about them.”
Sissons also has a passion for rail travel, something he explores in his other book Single Track Obsession. The book follows his 40 favourite railway journeys, from the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway to Paraguay and Peru.
• A Coach Load of Chaos is priced at £8.35 and Single Track Obsession costs £9.99. Both books are published by Trafford Publishing and can be ordered from bookshops or online at www.trafford.com.
POSTED: 04/10/2008 16:00:00
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