Things I Miss About Travel: A Very Indefinitive List

Not cooking unless I wanted to

Drinking horchata with ice cream

Falling in love, constantly, with everything

Learning new words

Not knowing where I would spend the night

Laughing at how stupid what I'm doing is

Thinking that people who spend years travelling are normal

Listening to 80s music on old school buses

Being a stranger (and all the questions that came with it)

Speaking to strangers (and all the answers and even more questions that came with it)

Not having a plan

Not feeling like I should have a plan

Being in places I'd seen photos of

Seeing petrified waterfalls (well, one)

Not going home when I was meant to

Meeting people who do what they love

Replacing "goodbye" with "until the next time"

Getting perspective on how much I have

Moments of kindness from strangers

Huge acts of kindness from strangers 

No one caring if I only have 3 tops

Not having a mirror

Coincidences

Trying to get to know someone from scratch

Sharing who I am with people I barely know

Change: constant and unstoppable

Learning what I can do when things don't work out

Reading about travel whilst doing it

Rarely having to be anywhere "on time"

Spending all day in a hammock

Spending all day walking around a new city

Spending all day in the sea (or on top of it)

Being slightly less pale

Pinching myself and thinking: I'm so lucky to be where I am right now

Not thinking in pounds or dollars or euros but a currency I'd never heard of before

Waking up for sunrise

Watching the world through a bus window

Celebrating Christmas in the jungle

Riding on the top of buses

Trying to understand what the hell is happening around me

People wearing tops with English slogans they don't understand

Getting wolf whistled (it gives me an excuse to get self righteous)

Following other people's crazy whims

Following my own crazy whims

Surrendering to the unexpected, the inconvenient and the irreplaceable 

Being in the moment

Lose Yourself

Lost & Found is an artsy performancy festival in Manchester. It's aim? Inspire people to engage with the city around them. Below is my writing on a poster up around the city.

(I would like to point out my intention was for it to actually look like a map. I feel like "ceci n'est pas une pipe." would have had a different meaning if it really wasn't a pipe.)

My First Stolen Traffic Cone

Starting out in life Icona had many dreams about how her future could be.

But life as a cone was not easy. Adolescence hit her hard.

She kept working the streets. Using her body night and day. The stress took its toll. When we found her she was on top of a bus stop.

Here comes the happy part of the tale. WE RESCUED HER! She took her first ever ride on the tube. The lovely man at the barriers didn’t even make her pay.

For the first time in her life, Icona had a home. She slept in a bed (the flowerbed). She was fed breakfast (by the squirrels).

Alas, such blissful happiness could not last. She had dreams, big dreams.

So one morning she packed her bags. She was off to Sweden to form a band…

The End

London for a Londoner

I made myself an alter ego. Meet Tourist Girl:

While Tourist Girl roams the city with her time freeze power (a camera) and gets excited by silly details (oooooh! A telephone box! A Real One. And it’s red!) the rest of us see it as it is.

Pretend Red Phone Boxes

Instead of looking at the Big Ben and going ooooooh! A CLOCK! The rest of us walk by, to get somewhere, quickly, very quickly because we’re very important and are far too wise and apathetic to get all excited by clocks because they’re big and phone boxes because they’re red.

But through all my hardened London ways, there was something I liked about their childish delight.

So I sent Tourist Girl out to explore. She went on the opentop bus and admired the sights.

I realised the tickets cost £26 and bought some wine instead.

This is Tourist Girl gaily frolicking along Hampstead Heath:

This is me writing essay draft number 214:

For a few weeks I let Tourist Girl put on a French accent and wear a detective style trench coat, while I sat at my desk, busy as usual. Tourist Girl’s adventures slowly crept more and more into my thoughts until I found myself wondering, briefly, how people would look at me if I was wearing a cloak (…hmmmm). Or how people would react when I told them what I did for a living (what? You’re a superhero whose biggest power is getting excited by phone boxes?).

I knew it wasn’t going to work. But I wasn’t going to let a simple matter like that stop me. I donned the robes of Tourist Girl. Translation: I wore what I always wear and used my phone to take photos.

I soon realised that everyone who lives somewhere explores. I had to rethink my plan. Things weren’t looking good. The open top bus company was ignoring my attempts at ticket forgery, and my French accent was all too quickly met with Ah! Tu es Française? Moi aussi!

Fleet Street

Then I struck gold. I could explore the places I walked by every day. Again.

The doorways beckoned. I went into the original Twining’s teashop. Again. And with my camera, it was quite literally a different place. Tourist Girl had the power of making rooms bigger, of putting portraits on the walls that hadn’t been there before, of seeing strange teas that weren’t in boxes, of being excited.

St Dunstan in the East

Art Galleries were no longer just the paintings, but the people looking at the paintings, faintly disturbed by me following them. Tropical gettaways magically appeared in the heart of the city. People got annoyed with me for standing on the wrong side of the escalator. (oh dear. I forgot the word and just had to type ‘stairs that move’ into Google).

Then again, Tourist Girl wasn’t really Tourist Girl. I couldn’t shake that all the places had memories. I couldn’t, much as I wanted, be free from the pressure of deadlines and work in the way Tourist Girl would be. Neither could I get excited by red phone boxes. Even though they were red.

But I had super powers Tourist Girl could only dream of. Super powers like not confusing the words Hungry and Angry. Unless for Italians the two really are the same.

Instead I mix leyendo and liando to proudly inform my Spanish housemate I’ve been rolling joints all day.

Which leads me onto the final twist in this happy ending – in London, the world comes to you:

The End