Retirement and going back in time…

It’s a stage of life we almost all get to. We chose to do it pretty early. I’m talking retirement (although many people might be forced into it as self-isolation increases).

So what’s it like? Well, it is a big change!! When you have always worked all day, 5 days a week, plus driving an hour or so each day, there’s suddenly a lot of time to account for. So it’s the perfect opportunity to do all the things that you always wanted to do but didn’t have time for…

I’m not sure I ever thought about what I always wanted to do but didn’t…

However having moved house and explored the new area, and taken a trip or two…and having settled into a pleasant routine of leisure time and voluntary activities, there was always going to be that little list of things that needed to be done… on a rainy day last November I decided to attack the things that never made it out of the useful cupboard downstairs after moving. I inevitably sorted them into another useful cupboard, and as I did so discovered things that have been languishing untouched for many years. You’ll be relieved to hear I’m not going to share all of them, but one of the things I found was a large box of photos and negatives from the days when photography involved 35mm films, developing and printing. Back then some got religiously filed in albums, but most of them probably got stuffed in a box never to be looked at again.

At the top of this particular box was a stash of 33 sets of film negatives from a round-the-world trip in 1991. Exciting stuff eh? Add to this that when clearing out Mark’s parents’ house last year I also discovered a film scanner – one where you can feed the negatives into a little box and the photo appears magically on the computer screen. These things together added up to a perfect little activity to while away some rainy days…

So that is what I have done. Typically the simple act of feeding the negatives into a scanner took way longer than I could have possibly imagined. A few technical issues along the way meant that I ended up copying over some and needing to redo the lot! Then I discovered that the first half I’d scanned on a low resolution so I did them again too… After such a labour of love I decided I needed to do something with them…

And here it is. A (re)visit to that trip of many years ago. You may think that there is nothing more tedious than hearing about someone’s recent holiday and seeing all of the photos. Well maybe someone’s holiday from nearly 30 years ago is worse? At least as a blog you can choose whether to read or not. So this is the warning – the blogs to come are my memories of that trip. The pictures are my photographs. I may have edited some of them slightly – I obviously was unable to photograph a horizontal horizon even then! But the scenes are mostly just as we found them (although I suspect the colours have degraded over time in the aforementioned box).

We set off in early 1991 equipped with an SLR each. I knew nothing about how to use one as I’d always had a compact camera. I’d bought myself a Pentax P30 with two lenses – and Mark gave me some basic lessons on how to use it. We bought lots of film before we set off, and carried them. In those days unless you got them processed you had no idea of how successful your shots were – and as film canisters are easier to carry than prints we just carried them with us, and printed them 12 months later. Probably not the best way to learn to use your new kit!! Now though, having moved to a mirrorless digital camera where you can see exactly what you’re taking (and taking masses of pictures of the same thing), I really am amazed by how few pictures I took of places we went – and in reality how few were really rubbish. Looking at them you may disagree!

The trip took us 11+ months, and we headed through Asia and into Australia and New Zealand. We had never done any ‘travelling’ together before, just a couple of short holidays. We saved up for it over the preceding 12 months, spurred on by my lodger Briony (whose idea it was to do it in the first place – then she didn’t), by working, rarely going out and just treating ourselves to a shared bottle of wine on a Friday night. (Perhaps life hasn’t really changed that much – although the wine may have got a little stronger!)

We planned a rough outline for the trip – a few flights – bought a couple of Lonely Planet books, and chatted to my friend Julia who had just done a trip to India. We then visited a man in a tower block in Wembley who sold us our train pass for the first 2 months. We bought ourselves huge rucksacks, had a few travel jabs, and off we went.

Back in 1991, for those of us who remember that far back.., there were no mobile phones and no internet, so doing anything like this was based on what you read in a book or what others told you. We must have been mad! Or just young.