I believe it's traditional at this time of year to think about "going outside" - not that I've been inside since last year but it feels like it sometimes. I don't think anything in a 300 mile radius counts towards going away - or maybe it does. Anyway, Florence is firmly on the radar for me now. Being as I've never been there before, that will be a good one but I'm probably going to have to toss up between Copenhagen and Paris to round the year off. I could possibly do both but not as 'nicely' as I'd like to. That might come down to the toss of a coin and I don't much care which side it lands on. I could quite happily live in either place if pushed. More than anything, it will be cool to bring in some other influences other than the four walls that exist inside my head to mess things up a little.
We're gearing up for a house move soon which has played nicely into my "we all own too much stuff" thesis. This last weekend, I went through The Books and split them into piles of "love it or lose it". I'm getting there - honest - and it's a lot easier once they're loaded into iBooks on the Pad to let them go than it used to be. This sort of behaviour is reserved in the main only for general fiction. Books that I've picked up, read and moved on but there's a whole other stack of books that I think will be around for a long time because there's been love and attention paid to them - and a reasonably large stack of books that are unlikely to ever see the inside of any digital reader. They must also stay - which kind of answers a lot of questions people may have. If it's not available as a digital book, people will still buy it - and keep it. Other people will see it on a shelf whereas they are unlikely to ever see your travelling library of data.
I still have mixed feelings about all of this but that's OK. We're in the middle of some change. Hell, when aren't we.
A lot of recycling was done as was a lot of throwing away. I still think I can get myself down to six objects and I hardly ever buy anything, so I'm totally unsure where all this 'stuff' comes from. Some of it is from boxes that have remained unpacked since we moved here in the first place and if you had been here, sometimes the contents would have surprised me as much as you. Anyway, whatever's left, I could probably live without in the event of an emergency but one thing is haunting me - and that's a very large stack of photographs that my Ma gave me. Family stuff - some of which goes way back before I was born but is relevant that nobody will ever care about other than me and her. What the hell do you do with photographs? I have half a mind to scan them and load them up somewhere and get rid of them. It's not the kind of thing you look at unless you happen to open the box they're currently in. I'm thinking that with a good scanning session, at least the two of us would know where they are and would almost certainly come across them a lot more often than we would open a box that's more than likely headed for loft storage.
And yet, there's something 'real' about them being in a box and being able to rummage. They're aged. Some are torn. Some have writing on the back that can't simply be replaced with a caption. I don't know if that's just me being sentimental. Maybe I'll scan them and put the box into storage as well.
Travelling light in the world is not as easy as it sounds, believe me.
Right now though, I have an appointment with the last episode of Game of Thrones.