Memory Lanes
In my travels so far, I’ve sought to strike a satisfying balance between visiting new places and rediscovering old favourites. Until now, however, there has been a tendency to favour novelty over familiarity, with even return trips prioritising new sites and sights in an attempt to expand my worldview and grow my photographic record. If I can tick off a new country in the process, all the better.
This year, I’ve decided to make an effort to address this imbalance and dedicate more time to naked nostalgia and shameless sentimentality. Early rumblings of a school reunion—currently earmarked for December–got me thinking about the places I’d once known and the lives I’d once lived. After all, we hadn’t just gone to school together; we’d boarded together. And yet, it already feels like a lifetime ago—maybe more.
If my year was to culminate in a school reunion, I wanted to build up to it by carrying that theme through the rest of 2024 as well. I lived in Ashby-de-La-Zouch between the ages of 15 and 18, but before that I’d called other places home, too: Elgin, Canberra, Brüggen. What if I could revisit them all? I hadn’t been back to School House in over a decade, but I hadn’t returned to my German and Australian stomping grounds for much longer than that.
This dislocation had in many ways defined my early years and yet it was something I’d never really reckoned with. Regularly uprooted and replanted elsewhere, I’d lost touch not just formative with places and people but parts of myself. Over time, my connections to these past lives began to wither and the associated memories started to fade. I could always reminisce with family, obviously, but that meant reliving only the experiences they’d been party to. It wasn’t the whole story.
Worried I might one day lose the plot entirely, I wanted to re-find my place in the narrative and tie up some loose ends; to jog memories by revisiting old haunts, reconcile past lives by reconnecting with estranged acquaintances and perhaps even lay some ghosts to rest or revive lapsed dreams along the way. Not time travel per se, but still a rolling back of the clock. A walk down memory lanes.
At first, I thought about working through these chapters chronologically, but, prevaricating, I’d left myself insufficient time to plan a spring excursion to Australia. I’d wanted to see Canberra in the autumn, to photograph Lake Burley Griffin and Black Mountain in their fall, but would have to leave it until the seasons had reversed. That’s if I could afford to go at all, or secure enough time off work to make it worth my while.
Instead, I decided to prioritise Germany, and thus booked five days in North Rhine-Westphalia. I wouldn’t be doorstopping anyone and asking to see my old room, however. Elmpt isn’t exactly a transport hub and I’d sooner base myself somewhere better connected. Rather, I planned to visit Aachen, Düsseldorf and Köln, peripheral cities that I’d once shopped in, rollerbladed around and largely taken for granted; to orbit and observe my old world rather than attempt to inhabit it.
Nevertheless, I longed to make some kind of contact. I reached out to a childhood friend still living locally and arranged to reunite across the border in Roermond, another town that had served as a backdrop to my boyhood and which, unlike Elmpt or Brüggen, helpfully had a train station. Our friendship had meant a lot to me, but my memories of our adventures were limited and lacking in detail, so I was excited to compare notes and swap stories—to be reminded of in-jokes and deep-cuts.
Will it work? Might exploring the past help to reframe the present and inform the future, leaving me feeling more rounded and content as a person? Or could the experience backfire, serving only to alienate me further from a life that cannot be relived and make me question whether people, places and experiences were ever really as I remembered them? I guess only time will tell.