the travel tracker app on my phone recently informed me that it has been 281 days since my last trip. it feels as long, and longer. (I think it might be the longest period I’ve been at home uninterrupted….ever. e-v-e-r.) a few weeks ago I was scrolling back through pictures of past trips, and found one of those nothing and everything pictures that take you right back into a time and place.

an attempt at a “self portrait”, taken in the room I was staying in in a “lodge” of sorts in juodkrante in lithuania a few years ago. I’d been to juodkrante before, but only passing through on a daytrip to nida. I don’t know why I thought spending a few days there, and out of season would be a good idea. I guess the appeal was the forest and the isolation (the deep, deep irony of that); far away from london. it was a slightly bad idea actually. I ended up being slightly bored and lonely. everything was pretty dead at the end of season. there was no decent food to be had, and it was eerily quiet, except for the odd shouty drunk who would join me to watch dusk settle on the glassy pink-blue of the lagoon in the evenings.

I walked through the forest to the beach every day. and shared it two or three people. I remember exactly how warm the sun was, and exactly how cold the water was. exactly how cool and green, and slightly scary the forest was, walking through it and in it. how sticky the spiderwebs and how pungent the mushrooms. the creak of trees leaning in the wind. the pink-blue lagoon, and dreaming in green in that room.

TL;DR: it’s great what vivid memories pictures can evoke