In Search of Lost Travel Time
Are you missing travel as much as I am? My guess is that many of us who share a passion for travel and like to write about it, are experiencing some uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms just now. Our favourite pursuit has had to be put on hold and there’s a gap in our lives yearning to be filled, which is at least half the size of a black hole. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve spent quite a lot of my lockdown time sitting in an armchair with a laptop on my knees, doing the next best thing to travelling: writing about it.
Actually, in a sort of subliminal and prophetic way - or perhaps it was just coincidence - I began writing up my first collection of travel stories ‘Travel Mementos: Personal Stories from Faraway Places’ a year or so before the Coronavirus came along and disrupted my travel plans. But much of the hard graft of revising, editing, proofing, and finding a publisher for my book has happened over the last twelve months. And as a result, it’s finally ready!
The personal stories I’ve chosen to retell span a long period of time. The earliest of them, Table Manners for Eating Noodles, dates from time spent in Japan during my twenties, and the last, Senior Moments in Segovia, from a trip I made shortly after retiring. There is almost forty years between them. The impetus for writing them was to recall and re-live some of the memorable encounters I’ve had while travelling over the years.
To piece together those events, in some cases after several decades, with the people they involved, the times and the places, I began with the individual memories, then turned to old photos, slides, annotated guidebooks and some of the curious mementos I took home with me. This helped to jog my memory further. At times, it has felt like a Proustian endeavour – although Marcel Proust, lying in his sickbed, must certainly have had a much harder task recollecting the past for his seven volume, 1,267,069 word autobiographical novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time).
The settings for the twenty travel stories in my slim volume are diverse. The cover blurb gives a taste of them: The argument in an Italian ice-cream queue, a bumpy becak ride in Indonesia, African migrants washing up on a Spanish beach, venomous scorpions in the Mexican sun. They span both continents and cultures. If I have piqued your interest or you would like a foretaste of Travel Mementos, an early draft of the Italian ice-cream story, ‘Gelato - As It Once Was’, was selected for showcasing in 2018 and can be found here: Julie Watson 2018 (fd81.net)
So if like me, you’re suffering from travel deprivation and looking for something to fill the void, I can recommend a nostalgic trip into the recesses of your memory in search of lost travel time – for the story that you didn’t quite find the time to write about – until now.
Julie Watson
Are you missing travel as much as I am? My guess is that many of us who share a passion for travel and like to write about it, are experiencing some uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms just now. Our favourite pursuit has had to be put on hold and there’s a gap in our lives yearning to be filled, which is at least half the size of a black hole. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve spent quite a lot of my lockdown time sitting in an armchair with a laptop on my knees, doing the next best thing to travelling: writing about it.
Actually, in a sort of subliminal and prophetic way - or perhaps it was just coincidence - I began writing up my first collection of travel stories ‘Travel Mementos: Personal Stories from Faraway Places’ a year or so before the Coronavirus came along and disrupted my travel plans. But much of the hard graft of revising, editing, proofing, and finding a publisher for my book has happened over the last twelve months. And as a result, it’s finally ready!
The personal stories I’ve chosen to retell span a long period of time. The earliest of them, Table Manners for Eating Noodles, dates from time spent in Japan during my twenties, and the last, Senior Moments in Segovia, from a trip I made shortly after retiring. There is almost forty years between them. The impetus for writing them was to recall and re-live some of the memorable encounters I’ve had while travelling over the years.
To piece together those events, in some cases after several decades, with the people they involved, the times and the places, I began with the individual memories, then turned to old photos, slides, annotated guidebooks and some of the curious mementos I took home with me. This helped to jog my memory further. At times, it has felt like a Proustian endeavour – although Marcel Proust, lying in his sickbed, must certainly have had a much harder task recollecting the past for his seven volume, 1,267,069 word autobiographical novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time).
The settings for the twenty travel stories in my slim volume are diverse. The cover blurb gives a taste of them: The argument in an Italian ice-cream queue, a bumpy becak ride in Indonesia, African migrants washing up on a Spanish beach, venomous scorpions in the Mexican sun. They span both continents and cultures. If I have piqued your interest or you would like a foretaste of Travel Mementos, an early draft of the Italian ice-cream story, ‘Gelato - As It Once Was’, was selected for showcasing in 2018 and can be found here: Julie Watson 2018 (fd81.net)
So if like me, you’re suffering from travel deprivation and looking for something to fill the void, I can recommend a nostalgic trip into the recesses of your memory in search of lost travel time – for the story that you didn’t quite find the time to write about – until now.
Julie Watson
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Julie Watson is the author of Travel Mementos: Personal Stories about Faraway Places. She lives on the Isle of Wight and is now writing a second book on a different subject.
Link to book publisher and list of purchase sites for book
https://beachybooks.com/bookshop/travel-mementos-personal-stories-about-faraway-places
Amazon link to Travel Mementos (print and e-book)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1913894045/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_5SRYMYXQYZGYY04J6ZR4
Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliewatson1/
