I have a long list of locations I’d like to take cameras to but travel restrictions imposed in the wake of the global pandemic have brought a halt to that. My ‘Journeys’ galleries are a visual diary of train rides I took between July 2019 and March 2020 – I haven’t been on a train since March 9th 2020. It doesn’t stop thinking and planning for future trips.
We’ve cancelled several flights to destinations like Denmark, Sicily, Spain, Italy and further afield south of the equator. We’ve not been able to drive through France to northern Spain and spend time in the dramatic landscape of the Bardenas Reales before heading for the coastline of Asturias and Galicia. Someone once said the best kind of spontaneity is well planned…
Not being able to travel gnaws at the soul – the thrill of walking or cycling around your own patch wears thin after a while and the longing for change after what’s been a very long winter is ever present. Heading south to Spain brings sun, Latin exuberance and chaos, a need to change the body clock to fit in with Spanish eating hours, the jumble of history and its architectural remains, the closed shutters and doors at siesta time, the stark, dry countryside and the finest olives in all Europe. I can’t wait to go back, to travel slowly and absorb once more a country and its culture and to come to terms, if ever possible, with the folly of Brexit.
