Categories: uncategorized
Date: 25 June 2010 14:26:44
I was somewhere else. I have my computer set up to pick photos at random to display as my desktop. And every now and again it picks out some record of a trip to some obscure part of Europe or other. Sometimes it was a trip to a place quite near where we lived, somewhere we went to many times. Sometimes it was a one-off, a trip from a conference or holiday location. Often I remember the frustrations of the day - trying to find a bite to eat on a Sunday in a German town that actually turned out to be tiny village, trying to find something to see or do in a town whose location, buried in the middle of the Pyrenees, had misguidedly drawn us to it, or scouring every backstreet to try and find an acceptable menu del día in Toledo. But I look at the photos and almost swoon with the desire to go back to the moment they captured. It's not that I've forgotten the rough side of life then, it's just that the photos seem to arouse only the positive feelings. With the places that were regular day trips, I'm also overpowered with the need to share the experience. I want to show my friends that place, I want to take my kids there (by contrast, I'm distinctly aware, with how my parents would have acted). I want, I suppose, to let people into what I see as a formative part of my background. It makes no sense that I would view a hill by the Rhein as a formative part of me, but I do. I suppose actually my response to it, my enjoyment of it, was and is revealing of me, a four dimensional Rorschach test. And I suppose that is why, when I once had the chance to persuade some people to visit one of my favourite places on the planet, I declined it. I didn't want to take them all there and have them tell me it was hideous and that, by extension, I was crazy. And I suppose that's also why, when I discovered someone else had been to that particular place, and enjoyed it almost as much as I did, I felt affirmed and felt closer to that person than I had before.