Being paid to write about someone you've idolised since childhood is nice work if you can get it. But when you're killing time in an overpriced Hong Kong bookstore by thumbing through a copy of said celebrity's latest tome and discover that he's written about you ... well, that's one hell of a peacock feather in the old ego fedora.
I'd almost forgotten about the three days spent tagging along with Michael Palin, world renowned explorer, author, and one-sixth of the most influential comedy troupe in the universe. (Perhaps 'almost forgotten' isn't quite right. 'Had only recently been forced to stop bringing it up in conversation' would be more accurate.)
In winter 2003, I was on an assignment for this paper, following mainland model, singer and author Yang Erche Namu as she headed back to her ancestral home of Lake Lugu on the border of Sichuan and Yunnan. She was playing tour guide to a BBC film crew, and I was to accompany her for three days to do an article on the real Namu.
We were on the plane, somewhere between Kunming and Lijiang, when Namu mentioned casually that we'd be travelling with Michael Palin. She knew he'd been in some movies and travel shows, but Chinese tastes in the early 1970s ran more towards Maoist agitprop than British comedy.
She had no reason to know Palin's reputation with many westerners my age. I was stunned, then flummoxed, and finally blown away by the realisation that I'd be travelling alongside one of my heroes.
Palin was in China working on Himalaya, his latest travel documentary. It's in the book of the same title that I found myself mentioned a year later. Palin describes our initial meeting on page 185: