Here is the book, because you have to have it or none of it works.
It is a hundred and eleven pages. It was published in Copenhagen in 1974 and in London in 1975 and it sold about four thousand copies and it has been out of print since 1981.
It is not a good book. That is worth saying at the start.
About sixty pages of it are a man being extremely pleased with himself in the way that men were in 1974, and there are four pages in the middle about what he calls the unpredictability of the method that Frankie Osei has read approximately nine hundred times and has always suspected of being rubbish.
And then there is page nine.
THE METHOD
1. Take the cheapest flight leaving from where you are within four days. Do not look at where it goes before you buy it.
2. Book the first bed only. Nothing else, ever, at any point.
3. Stay nine nights minimum. Anything under nine is tourism.
4. Learn four hundred words.
5. Eat where the buses stop.
6. Walk the whole of one road, end to end, whatever it costs you.
7. Find out what the place is frightened of.
8. Do not photograph anything for the first three days.
9. Talk to somebody over seventy in the first week.
10. When you are asked why you are there, tell the truth.
11. When you have run out of reasons to stay, go to the highest place in the city and decide there.
Rule eleven is the one nobody follows.
It is inconvenient and it is faintly ridiculous and it involves, in practice, a very great deal of standing on hills in bad weather, and Frankie Osei has done it thirty-one times and has never told a single person about it — not her editor, not her sister, not the man she lived with for two years in a flat in Peckham and who found the book in a drawer in 2032 and said, "What's this?" and she said, "Nothing."
Rule eight is the one she breaks.
She has broken it about four hundred times, because there is a job now, and the job has a commissioning editor and a photographer and a delivery date, and do not photograph anything for the first three days is not a rule you can take to a features desk.
She has felt bad about that for six years, which she is aware is insane.
Her copy has a name in the front of it in a woman's hand.
Agnes Osei, 1979.
And underneath, in the same hand, in biro, four words that Frankie Osei has looked at since she was fifteen:
He was very unkind.