The real voyage of discovery

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Goodbye

How very rude of me! I left without saying goodbye or where I was going next.

All of my online activity is now here with my best photos with the TZ5 of this blog here.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Um...

Tuesday 24th November : Gloucester

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I saw this at work and was amused.
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Rainbow

Monday 23rd November : Gloucester

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Hadn't seen one in absolutely ages. Didn't really make up for all the rain we've been having.
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Scruffy oik

Sunday 22nd November : Gloucester

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Tsk tsk!
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Monday, November 23, 2009

Gingerbread men

Saturday 21st November : Gloucester

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The boyfriend bought his eldest a gingerbread man decorating kit. The one on the right he did for me, the one on the left he did for his dad.
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Damn straight I felt special!
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Nada

Friday 20th November : Gloucester

Head full of so many things. Took the camera so many places that I assumed I must have taken a photo at some point.
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The boyfriend bought me some irises and yellow roses. I was thrilled, Irises are my favourite (cut) flowers but I couldn't remember ever telling him that. He sad he hadn't known they were my favourites but as Iris by The GooGoo dolls was my favourite song (a coincidence), he thought he'd get them.
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Knowing my favourite song is perhaps even better than him knowing my favourite flowers.
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I think I'll keep him.
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Seeing the world

There is a big difference between seeing and merely looking. Something that travel enables, is the ease with which we can view the world. Guidebook in hand we are signposted through our experiences. But few of us can afford to travel indefinately and anyway, I'm ready to come home. I'm returning to England but not to the North. I'm moving to a new part of the country. Yet while I'm very happy to be coming home, or at least be moving with the intention of putting down a few roots again and establishing a home, I'm not quite ready to stop my voyage of discovery.

My boyfriend informs me that Gloucestershire does not really exist, which makes me feel I'm off to a very good start. It is not the Midlands, it isn't the Home Countries, it's not the South West and is most certainly is not part of Wales. Instead it is a somewhat undefined pocket where some people drive tractors, some people never leave the Forest of Dean and some people are about to witness a KL Partygirl crash land on their lives and see her build a new life out of the wreckage.

Kathryn is moving to Gloucester! I'm trading in my rather fabulous little apartment with its view of the Petronas Towers and a rooftop pool located within walking distance of funky bars and restaurants serving cuisine of every nationality for what will probably be a room in a shared house in a market town in England that a year ago I knew just three things about; it was the setting for a Beatrix Potter story, it was the origin of one half of a former building society and it was where the man I'd (oh so inconveniently) fallen in love with lived.

Gloucester is of course far more than those things. Like anywhere, a place is what you make it. Nowhere is more or less than the location for your life. It is easy when you are travelling for everything is new, we can discover many things about ourselves, the world and our place within it by exploring new landscapes. What many of us forget, is that it is our perception that makes things interesting to us. As Proust so wisely put it, the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

This blog is about continually seeing my world with new eyes wherever I may be. I shall do this by focusing my attention and taking a photograph every day of something that has interested, inspired or simply amused me.

An extract from Alain de Botton's 'The Art of Travel'

De Maistre's work springs from a profound and suggestive insight: that the pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to. If only we could apply a travelling mindset to our own locales, we might find these places becoming no less interesting than the high mountain passes and butterfly-filled jungles of Humbolt's South America.

What, then, is a travelling mindset? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. We approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is interesting. We irrritate locals because we stand on traffic islands and in narrow streets and admire what they take to be strange small details. We risk getting run over because we are intrigued by the roof of a government building or an inscription on a wall. We find a supermarket or hairdresser's unusually fascinating. We dwell at length on the layout of a menu or the clothes of the presenters on the evening news. We are alive to the layers of history beneath the present and take notes and photographs.

Home, on the other hand, finds us more settled in our expectations. We feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about a neighbourhood, primarily by virtue of having lived there a long time. It seems inconceivable that there could be anything new to find in a place where we have been living for a decade or more. We have become habituated and therefore blind.

An extract from Tim Burtons's 'Burton on Burton'

I grew up in surburbia and I still don’t understand certain elements of it. There’s a certain vagueness, a blankness, and I get this very strongly from my family. The pictures my family had on their walls, I never got the sense they liked them, that they bought them, that somebody had given them to them. It was almost as though they had always been there, and yet no one had ever looked at them. I remember sitting there looking at some of these things going, 'What the hell is that? What are those resin grapes? Where did they get them? What does it mean?'

Growing up in suburbia was like growing up in a place where there's no sense of history, no sense of culture, no sense of passion for anything. You never felt people liked music. There was no showing of emotion. It was very strange. 'Why is that there? What am I sitting on?' You never felt there was any attachment to things. So you were either forced to conform and cut out a large portion of your personality, or to develop a very strong interior life that made you feel seperate.

An extract from A.C. Grayling's Liberty in the Age of Terror

The idea of the right to a nationality is the correlative of the idea of a right to mobility, if one reflects on the matter. An analogy that illustrates the point is this: suppose one could only be allowed a home if one never left it; or that if one were permitted to travel about inside and beyond the borders of one's country, one would not be allowed to go back to the starting point. Obviously enough the idea of having somewhere to go to or return to is key to the idea of travel; it is not travel if one has nowhere to return to, rather it is wandering or lostness. Generalise the point to nationality and movement within and across borders, and - not all that obliquely - one of the drafters' central concerns comes back into focus: that of the minimum conditions individuals to have a chance of making a good life for themselves. A nationality and a freedom to travel or change one's place of residence and work are framework conditions - not guarantees of flourishing, but necessities even before the work of building a good life can begin.

The real voyage of discovery

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Goodbye

Monday, November 30, 2009

Um...

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Rainbow

Scruffy oik

Monday, November 23, 2009

Gingerbread men

Nada

Irises

Seeing the world

Some of my favourite photos

Interesting images

My Manifesto

Followers

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An extract from Alain de Botton's 'The Art of Travel'

An extract from Tim Burtons's 'Burton on Burton'

An extract from A.C. Grayling's Liberty in the Age of Terror

How do others see the world?