Anxious traveller Jonathan Hehir signs copies of his book in Borders

4:40pm Thursday 25th June 2009

By Melanie Dakin

FEAR can cause us to do crazy things, as food development manager turned author Jonathan Hehir discovered when he set out to trek round the world. His experiences as an anxiety riddled traveller are recalled in his debut novel Bedbugs The Perils and Misadventures of an Anxious Traveller, which the Enfield writer will be signing copies of at 11am on Saturday in Borders, Watford.

Largely autobiographical, Bedbugs charts the experiences of Nathan, a 35-year-old successful London businessman with a high profile job looking at food trends, who decides to go on a long haul trip after splitting with his girlfriend of seven years.

Jonathan, who now works for a food development agency in Harrow dreaming up new toppings for popular pizza chains, also spent several years in the city working in food manufacture at Sainsburys head office in Holborn before the stress of living in the capital led him to pack it all in and head for the open road.

Being a foodie, Jonathan reels off mouthwatering lists of ingredients of every dish his character encounters, from water buffalo and oysters fried in beer to less appetising dishes such as mouse and tripe.

“I decided to take a year out to go on a world tour to and try the national dish in every country I passed through,” says Jonathan. “Like Nathan, I went to The Amazon in search of a new kind of fruit because if there is an undiscovered genus then that’s where you’ll find it.”

While away, Jonathan wrote a blog for www.worldnomads.com which gave him the confidence to write the book.

He says: “I did it to take my mind off things. It was good to get my emotions down on paper.”

The things Jonathan wanted to get away from were his mounting fears, which mirror Nathan’s.

“I suffered from anxiety. I’m now working on the prequel to Bedbugs before Nathan left the city and how he gets into this mess through having it too good for too long.

”Bedbugs is a metaphor for what’s crawling around in his head as he has these nerve-wracking dramas.

Despite his fears, however, Jonathan decided to keep the book quite light so Nathan’s angst is liberally peppered with funny anecdotes. Less amusing is Nathan’s poetry and his naivety, especially around women. The book could also have done with some very close editing but as a rights of passage experience, it’s probably best served raw. It’ll certainly hit home with globetrotters and gastronomes the world over.