Memories of a year gone

Ah, Florence © A. Harrison

I used to dream of walking along a path as a soft dusk fell. Stalls decked with fairy lights offered cold drinks and ice creams to passing couples strolled as kids ran between everyone. I had no idea where it was, yet I knew I’d been there, and it was a happy place.

It turns out I’d been here when at the age of ten. If only in my dream I’d turned round, I’d have seen Florence spreading below me, with the Duomo rising to the sky. When I finally came back to Florence it felt like coming home. Then one day as I walking I realised it was the path from my dream, leading from the Piazzale Michelangelo to the beautiful San Miniato al Monte. It was so easy to see why my dreams kept calling me here.

The old and the new; that was 2024. I returned to Florence, only this was for the first time on my own since my 20s. Travelling solo for the first time in nearly 40 years proved completely different (and I like to think, more that a little brave). I also visited places I’d never been – Seoul, Bologna, Scandinavia, the Arctic Circle and Estonia. For the first time I drove beyond the Blue Mountains and spent some time in Orange (which included one of these classic moments of walking into the bar and everyone stopping what they’re doing to look at me). I spent my 60th driving a sled pulled by huskies, then fell asleep watching the Northern Lights.

Even in places I’d been there were new things to find – the Brancacci chapel in Florence, the Arminian monastery in Venice. Michelin-star dumpling shops in Hong Kong hidden in back streets or a forgotten corner of a train station.

Samual Pepys once wrote ‘he who is tired of London is tired of life’. London may be a different place to to the time when he penned his thoughts, but the sentiment is the same: when there is nothing new to find, or see, or do, life does indeed become tiring.

Yet I don’t need a plane to do something new (although I won’t complain). A plant I haven’t grown before (the water spinach is sprouting), cooking something different each week from the myriad of books I have on my shelves. Coming home from work by back street I haven’t seen before – all ways of re-framing the world to see it afresh.

But I will return to Florence.

New friends in Bergen © A. Harrison

Enjoy my writing? Please subscribe here to follow my blog. Or perhaps you’d like to buy me a coffee? (Or a pony?)

If you like my photos please click either here or on the link in my header to buy (or simply browse) my photos. Or else, please click here to buy either my poetry or novel ebooks. I even have a YouTube channel. Thank you!

Plus, this post may contain affiliate links, from which I (potentially) earn a small commission.

Some of my other blogs you may enjoy: