Travelling: textures

There are a few reasons as to why I keep thinking about that turtle crossing the road in Syria: one, as I said, was because I'd been reading about Freya Stark's 'virtues of travelling'; I've also been thinking about the things that make travel exciting (unexpected events, the element of surprise, those serendipitous moments, incongruities); and I've been thinking about textures. Since that moment with the turtle, I've not been able to get an image out of my mind... more often than the picture of the turtle slowing crossing that Syrian country road, another image persistently enters my mind. It's a close-up of the turtle's shell, and the extraordinarily beautiful texture of the thing. And like a slide show screening in my head, a whole array of memories of textures in close-up follow... sculpted desert sands (Liwa, Mhmed), seashells on a beach (Ajman, Essaouira, Monkey Mia), and the shiny slippery white of marble rocks polished by the steps of time (Dubrovnik, Hvar, and a host of archaeological sites that have blurred in my mind).