“Hi! How was your holiday?”
“Don’t know yet. Haven’t looked at the pictures.”

It’s great to have the ability to take photographs with phones, tablets and cameras but do they enhance an experience or take away from it? Beyond a point, are they a distraction? Do they really capture in its entirety, the moment, the feeling, the memory?

On the boat ride yesterday, we didn’t have a camera. Yay! The experience of the calm undulating waves, the moisture-laden soothing breeze on the skin, the passing fishy odours, the thin film of brown wood-dust in short stretches, the tapering frothy bluish-white tail of the motor, the pencil thin, perfectly horizontal line demarcating the dark blue of the Indian ocean from the light blue of the African sky, the squelch at the bottom of the boat, the massive phoenix shaped cloud, the mixed sounds of the engine, the turbulence and conversations in Swahili would have been too much for any camera. The only way to carry it home was to close my eyes and soak it all in.

When I feel the squelching of my shoes in the freezing, wet English November, I shall have to stop for a moment and close my eyes.