Sunday Herald, The: PUSHY, CUNNING, DYSFUNCTIONAL, SELFISH: TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A

IN the course of my career, I have chatted with voodoo worshipping gunmen in Haiti, and drunk tea with Osama bin Laden; ridden unwittingly across a Bosnian minefield in a battered Lada, and guzzled beer through a gas-mask nozzle at an Apocalypse Party in a Tel Aviv nightclub, as Iraqi missiles fell on the city.

Then there was dancing the gazumba with stunningly beautiful Angolan girls in a basement bar in Huambo, and those nerve-wracking months hiking across the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan with holy warriors fighting the Russian invaders of their country.

Such is the life of the foreign correspondent.

What other job offers the opportunity to do such things? Foreign correspondents are the envy of their peers and the despair of their families. It is a profession that can provide a ringside seat to history and a frequent path to divorce - for anyone who settles down long enough to get married in the first place.

As someone once said: "It's a funny old world, " even though, for the foreign correspondent, it doesn't always feel that way at the time. I was once caught trying to illegally cross the PakistanAfghanistan border, disguised as a woman dressed in burqa, sandals and with painted toenails. I knew I'd been rumbled when one of the border guards - who would never dream of touching a woman - began to lift the burqa, and I wrestled with my rudimentary Pashto for the words: "Take your hands off me you cad!" Tea, biscuits, and much mirth followed, before my captors finally stopped giggling, and bundled me off for a three-week sojourn in a Pakistan jail. Dubbed the "Kandahari cross-dresser" by my fellow hacks, I was dogged by the epithet for months until an unforgiving foreign press corps found another victim to pick on.

Such humour - sometimes very black - is a prerequisite for the job. This funny old world can also be a cruel and unforgiving place: an uncompromising bear-pit in which foreign "corrs" and "stringers" are the roving eyewitnesses and interpreters for those of us glued to 24-hour rolling TV news bulletins back home.

Foreign correspondents are a strange breed.

Verging on the obsessionally curious, they are often part nomad, voyeur and masochist. Invariably resourceful, selfish loners - almost certainly cunning and pushy - the species has been variously described as a "luckless tribe" (by William Howard Russell, probably the first war correspondent) and "a bunch of dysfunctional bastards". At their performing best, they are first and foremost tellers of tales. Like the best pub raconteurs, they love the power of the yarn, and instinctively know that the quirky or human detail, which says, "I was there", is what makes stories come alive for the audience.

Some of the best examples of the eyewitness reporter's art have been broadcast on the BBC radio programme, From Our Own Correspondent, whose 50th anniversary is marked with a new book, containing more than 100 of the series's finest dispatches.

Tucked away in this volume are true gems: diverse examples of the kind of idiosyncratic stories that help us make sense of the world. From Andy Kershaw's insight into the life-death roulette played out at the TT motorcycle race on the Isle of Man - in which he tells how an old lady's budgie died of a heart attack induced by the roar of the bikes - to Allan Little's tense first-hand countdown to the demise of African dictator President Mobutu of Zaire, this is all about "being there".

After five years in Iran, and following the death of his Iranian cameraman and friend Kaveh Golestan, Jim Muir filed a moving dispatch which captured simply and eloquently the way in which so many correspondents become inextricably attached to places. I know from experience that it's a relationship that can stay with you forever. "My journey back to Tehran with Kaveh's remains was the saddest of my life, " Muir said, before ending his report like this: "When Iranians miss someone, they say, 'Your place is empty'. Kaveh, your place is very, very empty."

This is reporting from the heart as well as the mind. In the early hours of a February morning in 1996, I was packing for yet another overseas trip, tiptoeing around the house to avoid waking anyone, when I heard a FOOC broadcast that made me sit down, listen, and think seriously about the effect my job was having on those I loved. It was Fergal Keane's Letter To Daniel: an address to his newborn son, Daniel, in which he reflected on the reporter's personal - and professional - role and responsibility.

It was also a wonderful meditation on the dangerous and often callous world in which we all live. "Your coming has turned me upside down and inside out, " said Keane. "So much that seemed essential to me has, in the past few days, taken on a different colour. Like many foreign correspondents I know, I have lived a life that on occasion has veered along the edge; war zones, natural disasters, darkness in all its shapes and forms. In a world of insecurity and ambition and ego, it is easy to be drawn in, to take chances with our lives, to believe that what we do, and what people say about us, is reason enough to gamble with death. Now, looking at your sleeping face . . . I wonder how I could ever have thought glory and prizes and praise were sweeter than life."

Beautifully written, emotive, and compulsive listening, Letter To Daniel generated an unprecedented response from listeners. The BBC was inundated with telephone calls, requests for repeat airings, and copies on tape or disc. Like pages from an artist's sketchbook, these short five-minute or so dispatches are often profoundly revealing and, collected together like this, they are valuable testimony to the changing demands that today's foreign correspondents confront compared with their counterparts of 50 years ago.

"The end of the foreign correspondent as we know it is nigh, " has long been the warning of many within the managerial and administrative ranks of the news business. Infotainment, changing trends in homes, gardens, holidays and personalities, are the order of the day, say the market researchers and bean counters (and even some editors). Prohibitive life insurance costs, restrictive access and expensive airfares, are other reasons cited, within an increasingly cost-conscious industry, to explain why foreign reporting at one time appeared to be heading for semi-extinction.

But just when the clamour was reaching its peak, along came al- Qaeda, 9/11, the "war on terror" and suddenly, listeners, readers, viewers, realised the truth of John Donne's much quoted observation that "no man is an island". Far removed as we might think we are from the world's political machinations, dark murmerings in the caves or mountains of Afghanistan or elsewhere, can - and do - impact dramatically on all our lives.

The foreign correspondent's job is to make such distant and seemingly inpenetrable goings-on meaningful; to interpret parts of the world's cultural, political and economic jigsaw in a way we can understand. Without them, there would be no independent eyes and ears, and our existence would be reduced to the scale of some mediaeval village: preoccupied only with the concerns of self, family and neighbours.

The role - and the people who carry it out - has changed over the years. Today's high-tech hacks could not be further removed from the hapless caricature of foreign correspondent William Boot, from Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel, Scoop. No cleft sticks for us, though in this modern age of satellite phones and the internet, I've sometimes thought that a pigeon with the copy tied to its leg might have saved me half the grief that only computers can create.

In The Correspondent's Trade, filed for FOOC in 1976, Ian McDougall looked back on his 27 years of service as reporter with the BBC. During that period he sent more than 10,000 news stories from over 40 countries in four continents. "It wasn't until the early 1950s that I recall being equipped with a portable recording machine, " he said. "The first of these was unbelievably heavy and big enough to pack a fair-sized puppy in. The tape had to be wound back by hand, which is a perfect remedy for instant calamity. A two- year-old child would have been an easier travelling companion."

McDougall also pointed out, however, that while communication had vastly improved, it had often reduced the frequency of the old- fashioned scoop.

"There's no merit at all in being first with a load of boring old rubbish, " he observed. In these days of 24-hour TV news, I have heard many contemporary broadcast reporters make similar complaints.

"How can I go and get the story, if they want me constantly standing by near a satellite feed point? I can't be in both places, " said one newsman to me in Erbil in northern Iraq shortly after hostilities had broken out in the last war there.

The "they" to whom he was referring were his editors at their desks back home. The reign of the desk editor is a long-standing bone of contention.

From Kabul to the Congo, correspondents have grumbled over their night-time beers about these "journalists", who have never done any reporting, never tried to "feed" the satellite or meet a deadline when there is no electricity or some Liberian child soldiers on crack cocaine have other ideas about how you can entertain them of an evening.

Victoria Brittain, a veteran reporter of 30 years, once described the difference between the desk editor and the field correspondent like this: "The former get up early, read the papers, magazines and news agencies on the internet, and are then ready to tell the latter where to go and what to write." Today, however, an old style of foreign correspondent has made a comeback: the one man/woman band. Television news broadcasts, radio pieces, internet blogs, newspaper stories, sometimes even camera operators: they do the lot.

The downside, of course, is that this inevitably leaves them little time to do what they actually do best: spend time talking with soldiers, refugees, drug dealers, aid workers, politicians and perhaps most importantly of all, ordinary civilians - then tell it as it is.

How, then, to describe the job of the foreign correspondent? Glamour doesn't come into it. This dispatch is being written in a Jerusalem hotel room where shortly I will wash my laundry in the sink before heading out to meet a few militant Israeli settlers. Then, perhaps, I might retire to a suitable hostelry to discuss the question with fellow members of the luckless tribe.

From Our Own Correspondent is published by Profile, pounds-16.99