It was an early start for my day-trip to Albania in June 1991. I was lying on the back seat of the tour coach at 6 a.m. on a crisp blue morning reading War and Peace and waiting for stragglers to arrive. I was halfway through the book when I arrived in Corfu on holiday, but had decided to give it a break and spent the first week reading Zorba the Greek instead by Nikos Kazantzakis. I was finding his flowery, convoluted style deeply irritating, so it was a relief to return to the crystal clear prose of Tolstoy.

I was sharing a room with my dad on holiday, and we were not getting on well. He was pretty bad tempered most of the time, and I was feeling fairly hopeless about my life. I think my beard freaked him out even though he’d had one himself as long as I could remember. We had an argument one day that summed up the mood between us. I said that with all the bad in the world, the fact that it survived at all was amazing. He said quite the opposite was the case. The world continued because there was more good than bad.

Back in England, I was unemployed and playing the benefit system. When you are signing on, you’re not supposed to go on holiday; you are meant to be always available for work, and so I had arranged for my only friend Al to come down to London from Cambridge to forge my signature and sign on for me. Though I was reasonably adept at playing the system and had, at various times, briefly claimed housing allowance for two places while only renting one and worked illegally in an assortment of casual jobs while claiming the dole, I wasn’t flourishing as one of the unemployed. My bed-sit was squalid, and my next-door neighbour along the dusty, rotting landing of my decrepit building in Pimlico, a middle-class half-caste guy called John, who had dropped out of a law degree at Sheffield University, was, quite frankly, crazy. I was in danger of going that way myself. Partly in pursuit of an artistic way of living but mostly in protection of a wounded soul, I had isolated myself from everyone apart from Al. He too wanted to be an artist. I wore a long and bushy beard. Some people considered me inadequate, but I was a really excellent shoplifter. Thieving bottles of Moet & Chandon from Tesco was a particular speciality of mine when Al was coming down for a visit.

Our hotel in Corfu was in a beautiful location next to the sea. It was far enough from the port area with its restaurants and bars that, apart from the noise of the waves, it was almost silent around us. There was no sound of human activity. My thirteen-year old sister was in the adjoining room with her friend. They were both physically quite well developed for their age, and they were having a better time than me, especially in the evenings. I was stuck lying on my bed reading Kazantzakis or sitting on the balcony of the room with only my Dad for company. A day trip to Albania would give me some breathing space from them all.

It took about an hour for the coach to drive the length of the island to Corfu town, picking up people along the way, and then forty-five more minutes by ferry to cross over the short stretch of sea between Greece and Albania. We were greeted on arrival in a grim small port by a few officials. They stamped passports and directed us straight onto a waiting Mercedes-Benz coach. There were no other boats arriving or leaving. Nothing else seemed to be happening in the port. The coach drove us straight to a hotel on the edge of town. Apart from people standing around on street corners and in doorways, staring silently at us, no one in the town seemed to be doing anything at all.

The hotel restaurant was in a garden with a lovely sea view. After a terrible meal, the tour guide gave us a choice of visiting some Roman ruins further out into the countryside or staying behind and exploring the town. The place gave me the creeps, so I decided to stick with the main group visiting the ruins. A little wrinkled old man from Holland dressed all in blue like a sailor came walking suddenly towards the hotel. He was part of our group but had ventured away up the shoreline. A large number of children were chasing him, swarming round him and roughly pulling at his clothes. It was an exciting spectacle. Just as they threatened to engulf him he threw a handful of coins high up in the air, and the children scattered just long enough for him to break free and swiftly make his way back to join us.

In contrast to the wretched state of its people, that part of the coast of Albania is stunning, lush, green, and beautiful. I can’t say I did much there apart from observe poverty. However I felt sufficiently moved by my visit to give my half-read copy of War and Peace to the educated, middle-aged lady guide when we were leaving her behind. It was quite a precious gift to me. It was full of the reference notes I had inscribed with a biro to help me keep up with the extraordinarily rich story as it developed. She didn’t seem surprised or grateful.

The ferry trip back to Greece, that evening, in the dark, was quite jolly. I think we were all delighted and relieved to be leaving Albania. The little old man from Holland, an experienced traveller, was entrancing two Australian girls with his stories. I was part of his small audience of three on the open deck, but he largely ignored me. I began thinking I might have a Chinese meal when I got back to my resort. Corfu has everything a middle-of-the-road tourist wants of his leisure time. There was one event still waiting for us though. When we were halfway across our boat took an obvious detour from the direct route towards the twinkling lights of Corfu Town. A Greek sailor appeared on the passenger deck in an immaculate white officers’ uniform, carrying plastic bags and asking for donations of spare food and drink. My group gave him a bottle of fizzy drink and some unopened crisps. Our vessel banked next to a tiny island overgrown with green vegetation and out of the darkening gloom appeared a man swimming towards us. The officer tied up the bags and threw them into the water. In the distance I noticed several more men all in states of undress but clearly in army fatigues. They were bedraggled, waving to our boat and smiling. We cheered. Behind them, up a small incline and almost hidden from view, was a concrete hut. I could see it well enough to make out that it was basic in the extreme and barely impressive enough to be called a military watchtower.