Surely not another blog, I hear you saying...

ANOTHER blog, when we already have Purple Tern, to log the story of our Big OE (and the substory of our home in Sarawak), and The Velvet Cushion, to keep track of the kind of inner travel I do through books, movies, music, and so on?

Well, yes. Another blog, because I have identified a gap.

Vintage Travel is precisely what it sounds like. The posts will be accounts of travel we undertook before my first blog saw the light of day in early 2010.



Often they'll come straight out of the diary I've kept since 1992 -- although when I say "straight", I mean "pretty much verbatim, but suitably edited to remove spelling mistakes and rude comments, and annotated where necessary".

But there'll also be the odd story that somehow got recorded in pre-diary days, and I'm not going to rule out some custom-built reminiscing...





I suppose it's not entirely uncoincidental that this new venture is emerging at a time when the coronavirus is limiting our Big OE to a tightly delimited area of Norfolk, UK, and putting our life in Sarawak on hold completely... But hey.

I've actually wanted to do this retrospective for a while. A sample "vintage travel" post came out back in 2014. It was supposed to be the start of a series, but it remained an only child. Well, finally, it will have some friends-and-relations.



The posts from all three current blogs show up on the NilAligned home page.

If you just want to follow the OE experiences, without any of the books-and-art or ancient-travel stuff, then stick with Purple Tern.

Purple Tern will be updated very regularly, as we travel (however narrowly travel has to be conceived these days); The Velvet Cushion and Vintage Travel, where the posts are less time-sensitive, will be a bit more sporadic.

So, we're off. However much our lives might be circumscribed in the present and the future, there are no restrictions on journeys into the past, and I'm looking forward to rattling my way down some ancient tracks.

(And in case you're wondering, all the pics in this post feature Manx vintage travel modes, and date from 1990.)