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Just as many of today's school leavers do, back in 1997 when I finished secondary school (and had recovered from a these days-requisite bout of glandular fever), I ignored my parents' gap-year holiday accident warnings and packed a rucksack full of bildungsroman reading, heading straight for the international departures lounge.
Although I wouldn't change the experience of my 14 month "world tour" for a thing, I can't help but wish I'd been less naïve and blindly hedonistic while stamping my way around the worn paths already trodden for me by the not so lonely Lonely Planet generation.
It is one thing to have a good time and indulge the caprices of one's own youth; it is however, altogether another to forget a whole fortnight in Berlin.
Perhaps the only thing that saves me from having complete amnesia of my time in the city, then the newly-crowned and fascinatingly nascent capital of post-partition German (so I've read), is an ambient recollection I retain of the light and mood of a slow and heavy summer. Trying to look back on it now, it feels as if I had read an impressionist novel while in a state of distracted stupor and retained it as only a faint murmur of cryptoamnesiac memory. Granted, this may be attributable to my probable view of the city: through the base of a beer mug.
And Berlin, while the capital of my youthful excess, is by no means the only of which I have a blurred recollection.
There was the time that only the quick-thinking of a Canadian fellow-backpacker averted my suffering certain personal injury a road-related holiday accident. Tired from a long hike in the Cochis mountain ranges of Georgia (and burdened with a gold medal-winning hangover) I had stepped straight onto the road and into the path of an oncoming bus. The Canadian, who must have possessed Herculean strength, somehow managed to lift me by the nape of my collar and pulled me back onto the roadside, perhaps even saving my life in the process.
While my most of my gap-year scrapes and near-misses were, I'm still ashamed to say, the result of my own negligence or inattention, it is all too often that gap-year travellers fall victim to holiday accidents through no fault of their own.
These perils are among the worst fears of every parent, and make good planning essential.
A prominent no win, no fee lawyer comments, "For thousands of students, their gap-year will provide fun and essential lessons in life, broadening their outlook and enabling them to experience new and different cultures.
"Every year, however, we are instructed by students who have been injured, sometimes very seriously, while travelling abroad during their gap year. It is always a tragedy but we are also often asked to help the families of students who have died abroad.
"Even when using reputable providers of gap year travel, things can go wrong, particularly when travel or other services are subcontracted to local agents. In turn, sometimes the agents employ staff without the necessary skills or experience and this is often when things go wrong.
"Unsurprisingly, the most exciting activities will often carry the highest risk of injury, but simple steps can reduce the risk of things going badly wrong without spoiling the experience itself."
