The Travels of my Summer Journal

Early in 2013 I bought a blank unlined notebook from Paperchase for a fiver with the intention of using it for a creative writing project. After realising I wasn't creative enough to pull it off, I decided to dedicate the notebook to my summer travels, and wrote the title - Summer 2013, as you see above - on the blank cover.

In June the notebook travelled with me to Skyros, where I doodled horses all over the cover, practised a bit of Greek writing, and drew a couple of cats too. Oh, and Hara the dog, as you see just below the title. One evening my great friend, 10-year-old Julietta, asked me what my favourite number was (12)  and my favourite animal (do you even have to ask?) and drew this lovely design for me.

When the journal and I visited Romania, it became my lesson-planning brain-exploding outlet for confusion and frustration with the fact that I wasn't enjoying teaching. But there were good days too. As you see.

And above all, I used it to record day-to-day happenings, at first only items of particular interest (see below - ate my first chicken kebab), but with some increasing detail as time went on.

The journal ends abruptly on the 10th of August - the day I left it on the train. We got on at Lyon, and when I stepped off at Grenoble my journal was lying hopefully under the seat I'd been sitting in.

I despaired.

I called all the lost property offices along the train line, and after a few days I was prepared to give up hope. I wasn't getting anywhere. Then I received this email, entitled 'travel book forgotten in the train'.

¡ Hi !
Last sunday with my wife we took the train Bordeaux-Vintimille in the station of Marseille, and we found a notebook forgotten on a seat. Inside there is your mail adress. Is it yours ? If it is, we can send you by the post. 
Friendly,
[anonymized, of course].

The most amazing thing about my saviours is that my email address was only on the page where I'd written down my bank details. To be safe, I changed them all at once, but they had had my notebook for a few days I believe before they found the means to contact me, and all they did was let me know they had it.

Restores your faith in humanity, doesn't it?

So they posted it to the airbnb flat we would be renting the following week in Como.

Unfortunately, it arrived the day we left for France.

Fortunately, our kind Italian landlord made regular trips to the UK, and the next time he came over, he brought my package and posted it locally. When the notebook made it to Cumbria, I'd returned to Scotland for university. At last, when I returned home for Christmas, I was reunited with my journal, which officially travelled more extensively than I did in summer 2013.