Scrap Paper Tigerthe online home of Sonya Hallett

The journey begins…

I feel like I’ve been packing and re-packing for weeks.  Condensing, eliminating, stuffing, re-ordering and generally squishing four years’ worth of university life into boxes and suitcases so that I can actually move out and get on with my life, and most importantly get on the road.  I’ve been planning for some time now to take off; travel all over Europe, Asia, the World; help out on farms, couchsurf, hike, and all the time put all the things I see and experience down in words and pictures, leaving a generally inky trail wherever I go.

But first, there’s still the packing.  I mean, seriously, where does half of this stuff even come from?  When did I get a rainbow coloured boat-kite?  What do I do with so many black and red t-shirts?  Why do I have a sequined sparkly pink Chinese dress at the back of my wardrobe and whose is it?? (it’s definitely not mine)  More mysterious are all the unidentifiable odds and ends lurking at the bottom of drawers and under the bed: weird-shaped screws, bits of circuit board, keys for forgotten locks…  I’m beginning to wonder if someone had actually been sharing my room for the past few years without me noticing, only sneaking in to deposit random objects and steal my biscuits.

In the end I just decided to give as much of it away as possible.  Some of the useful stuff I kept of course, but I don’t like the feeling of my possessions beginning to own me, demanding to be sorted and packed, jostling to be organised – especially things I didn’t even know I had and definitely don’t need.  Back when I lived in London, we lived next door to an old man who owned a sinking narrowboat full of stuff: old books, moulding toys, curling copies of the National Geographic circa 1953…  At least once a week, he’d rescue a mouldy box-load of stuff from the subsiding barge and deposit it along the doorsteps of all the nearby neighbours depending on their interests – our house got anything on China for my dad, plus tons on natural history, wildlife and biology for me.  I don’t know if the old man ever managed to rescue all of his stuff from the sinking boat, but as it got closer and closer to the day I was supposed to be leaving Edinburgh, I began to feel increasingly like I was racing against time trying to work out who to give what possessions to, what to keep, etc, before… how can I make this sinking boat analogy work? …before I had to chuck all that remained into the dark waters of Leith.  Ok, maybe not. (but you get the picture)

Anyway, so here I am now in the big house in Shropshire (where my grandparents once lived and auntie and family now live), rucksack finally packed and heading off for the airport in the morning.  I was going to finish this post earlier but there was a tiny puppy attached to my shoelace, a big hairy dog that wanted a walk in the hills and hyper kids wanting to hide said-puppy in a filing cabinet, so I was a bit preoccupied.  The last couple of days I’ve spent mostly out walking with Arty (big hairy dog) around the woods and Long Mynd, revisiting all those walks I went on in the school holidays as a kid, the early-summer flowers blooming so hard they look like they might strain a petal.

Up on top of the Mynd yesterday, I saw a row of trees in the middle-distance, all standing in a long line.  They were so out of place and huge that I was sure for ages that they were giants queing for something over the hills…

I’m going to try and update here fairly often with pictures and new of my travels, but for now I’d better sleep or I’ll miss my flight in the morning and will have to spend the next few months making up adventures here instead to avoid embarrassment.

- Sonya

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Commissions welcome. Contact me at sonya@sonyahallett.co.uk for more information.