Were off 2

There are so many journey metaphors around that I'm not going to begin by packing the bags but by unpacking.

I'm a passionate writer with too many passions, among them being Antarctica and historical treasures. I regularly go south as a history lecturer and tour guide and I help organise exhibitions about all sort sof things. I guess its pointless to note that some of the exhibitions concern Antarctica.

Do you know that feeling of privilege and excitement when you see a wonderful thing/place for the first time ? When you stand (on the deck of a ship) before a block of ice the size of a small country or look from the stern of a southward bound vessel and gaze at the delicacy and grace of albatross hanging in the wind ? And then you come home and open up a volume of watercolours painted by someone in the mid 177os - a painter with Cook's remarkable expedition - and see that albatross pictured and stored in a magnificent collection of work that records the story of people travelling to and settling in the southern continent

Thats what I want to talk about. That beautiful and uncertain connection between the immediate and the recollected and how this is maintained and represented.


Steve