What to do when a particularly stressful second semester turns your brain into a pancake (and I mean the thin holey kind, not the fruit-and-syrup-clad puffed up American kind), and leaves you unable to form one coherent thought, let alone write?
Breathe life into a three-year old draft!
Actually, these pictures have some kind of relevance, albeit tenuous. It's almost exactly three years since I took this trip to Bath for my 21st birthday. Everything glowed in that June light, glowed with promise and contentedness. I was older, wiser, happier. I wasn't tired of taking photographs or writing about them. I was old enough to know what I liked, but young enough to feel like my future was some faraway thing I could idle towards at my own leisure. (Fast-forward to now: I wear the same shoes, I still take photographs of cow parsley, but everything is tinged with worry about my future, about money, about how 'time comes to us all'.) The smell of wild garlic, clustered in the woods that circle Bath, will always remind me of this feeling of tranquility and ease. When girls came of age years ago, they got access to their money, a debutante dress, and maybe a husband. When I came of age I got sun-speckled hills, midsummer weather, and wild garlic. A special time.
Also, the Bath trip took place a week before Springsteen played London, twice. Two nights that changed my horizon for good. Next week I see him play twice again.
I'd argue this latter connection is the more important one.
