These four illustrations are inspired by a poem by Alex Turner of The Arctic Monkeys (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyAuzt2PmRI). The poem is about travelling on the train in the UK, which i do quite a lot of. I thought this a particularly suitable metaphor for my relationship with the UK- I know only London and Edinburgh- the rest I experience through a train window hurtling by.
One of the things we tend to look for when we travel is somewhere ‘exotic’. The word first came into wide spread use into 19th century, and it was used to refer to places like Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, it was about markets and harems, man with small mustaches, camels, mint tea and dunes. There tend to be some pretty random associations around the word ‘exotic’, in fact you could find almost anything exotic, depending on where you come from and what your tastes are. If you came from a land of sand and pyramids, a typical English summer’s day would be reliable to be extremely exotic.
Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
Welcome!
Exotic birds
My eyes, your heart
Because I’m a shut-in, Edinburgh to me is just my room, and all I do in there is work, eat and sleep. Nothing in the world can compare to eating and sleeping, oh the joy it used to bring me. But even these leisure activities have gradually turned into a boring daily routine, possibly because eating and sleeping were in fact a daily routine to begin with, but I no longer derive pleasure from it as much as I used to. So there is now no difference between work and leisure, and I’m just getting through each day for the sake of existing, it’s a wonderful feeling.