This is the before-now-untold story of my first foreign correspondent gig.

I’d run out of life choices I wanted to make in the UK, so I hightailed it to Mexico. I arrived clueless but keen, with a plan so flimsy it could have been blown away by a passing bus.

Within weeks, I was camping in the Lacandon Jungle with the Zapatista rebel army as it prepared to march on Mexico City. This was not a career path recommended by any journalism school. I’d had no apprenticeship in the dark arts of war reporting, and was without a bureau, fixer and hostile-environment training.

But I was available and halfway-literate.

A revolutionary time was had by all. I'd gone there in flight from one life and found myself standing at the entrance to another.

Love, like, share, grind up against, all the verbs.