When I was travelling in 2012, naturally I took a lot of photos, and I created a folder of pictures that I’d straightened, cropped and saved in the right proportions to fit my ‘desktop’, and then set up as a random display. When I went somewhere new, I would add to it, so there was at least one from each place (and many more from some). In the end there were 474 altogether (I just checked). I used it for a couple of years, then got tired of it and changed to more recent images, and not so many.
Last week, I decided on impulse to go back to it, so all of these pictures of places I went have been flashing up, changing every minute, which is a terrible temptation just to sit and stare at the desktop without actually doing anything. Some of them I recognise – some instantly, as they’re well known tourist icons, others are more difficult and occasionally there’s one which could be anywhere (or any of several places, at least).
I don’t know why I just said that, except that it’s what I’ve been doing for the last few minutes.
Istanbul, Barcelona, Venice and then… not sure, red and blue boats in a rocky harbour – Sorrento, maybe? The out of the way fishing harbour that I ‘discovered’ in the pouring rain on the afternoon of my birthday – if so, it must have been taken when I returned on the following morning (Easter Sunday), because the sun is shining. But I’m not convinced – there are so many pictures of little boats with bare masts and furled sails, in picturesque harbours. Sometimes I can work it out on the basis of the weather, what time of year it seems to be – Brittany in February, San Sebastian and Provence in March, Italy in April, Croatia and then Istanbul and the Black Sea coast in May, then the long, long stretch over the heart of the continent in June, to the Baltic (Flensburg and Stockholm) and Atlantic (Norway, Hamburg, Amsterdam) in July.
I tried to speed up the rotation, but one minute is the minimum Microsoft will allow me for each image. I’m sure it used to be possible to set it at 30 seconds, but that was in an older version of Windows.
Just flicked back and caught sight of a wonderful wintery image of a sandy Breton beach at low tide, with a stranded boat, a gull just taking off in the foreground and the mist so thick in the air – I remembered how much it reminded me of Wales. I’ve never been back, never seen Brittany in summer, I’ll always have this memory of cold and mist and constant drizzle – to be fair, that also goes for many of the places I visited in Provence and Italy, in that relentlessly rainy April.
I don’t know what I was going to write about today. Not that. But maybe that was safer than how I’ve been feeling.