As told to Elisabeth Easther
When I turned 21, my parents gave me a return ticket to London, but because I didn't have much money, I cashed in the return. I flatted with a friend, who was a nurse, she did night shift and slept all day, and I had the bed at night. You think you'll never do that sort of thing, but it just made sense.
I hired a car with three friends and we toured Europe. We could hardly shut the boot, we had so much stuff. We took the ferry from Dover to Calais and our first stop was a campground in Paris. Everyone was partying and one girl sped around the campground in our car, which upset the locals. At about 5am, we're sound asleep in our sleeping bags - and you know how loud tent zippers are - and the zip goes up and all these policemen are shouting at us in French, telling us to get out for making a disturbance in the campground. Still in our pyjamas, we stuffed everything in the car - we didn't even fold the tent - our passports were thrown at us, and that's how we drove into Paris.
Two of us stopped in Mykonos and found work at a beach bar, which happened to be at a nudist beach. We were allowed to wear clothes, but there was a big glass cabinet with all the food in it, and people would come up and point at the food, and we'd serve them, at eye level with their nakedness. Europeans have a very relaxed attitude to nudity.
When I lived in Scotland and my brother was in Portugal, our parents came over and we went to Morocco. We met in Casablanca and it was brilliant, except for Fez. There was an uprising while we were there and the protesters targeted foreigners by torching five-star hotels. We were only three-star, but some five-star hotels burned to the ground. There were tanks throwing out tear gas, pushing the protesters back, and at the hotel, there was no electricity, no food, nothing. We packed our bags and sat in the stairwell all night long because our rooms faced the street and people were throwing things through the windows. In the morning we went to our car, although the hotel didn't want to open up in case people stormed the garage, so they got the military to help and eventually, we drove out of Fez.
