Tell me about it. My supervisor has been on 3 foreign conferences recently. Ask him to read my thesis or where would be good for me to go on a conference and it's a different story.

Oh mine has been to two located on two different continents in May alone. I have only been to ones that are within 100km radius of my city.

Our group does worry about papers, because they are counted in the RAE.
From what I have seen, students don't usually publish till after their viva - once their thesis is accepted, the supervisors go through it and decide which chapters to publish. If they are on a paper it's usually joint with several other people/groups.

It depends on your discipline but I think that in most of the humanities is extremely rare to find someone who has published before his 2nd or 3rd year, and many people finish their PhD with no publications whatsoever and still pass their viva.

As for conferences - what about putting together an abstract for a conference, send it and see what happens? At the beginning of this year (my 1st one) I was a bit under the pressure to start giving papers immediately so I sent an abstract to every conference which suited my interests - I've presented in 2 so far and still have 4 before the summer. In many fields there are conferences or study days exclusively for PhD students so they could be a good start point - usually they are more relaxed.