Weekly Photo Challenge: Inspiration

This challenge is so easy!

Ivan Petcher (1932-2003)

When I was a boy I developed a desire to see interesting places after visiting them through the stories that my Dad used to tell me. He was a well read and an educated man who passed on to me his love of history and geography. The family house was never short of books and encyclopaedias and he always had an abundance of time to enjoy them and share their stories with me. Through his inspiration I learnt about Paris, Rome, Athens and Madrid and travellers like Marco Polo and Captain Cook and I vowed that one day I would see these places for myself.

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Special Photo Challenge: Inspiration

Finding a picture that explains my blogging inspiration is a tricky one but I have settled on this one because it works on several levels:

When my dad died I took possession of a box of papers and mementos which included a scrap book and several exercise books with yellowing dog-eared pages which included notes and stories of things that he liked to write about and keep a record of and these provided a treasure trove of secrets that helped me understand him and get to know him in a different way to I did when he was alive.  Discovering new things about him really shouldn’t have come as a great surprise because there are many dimensions to a life but the only one that I was fully familiar with was in his role as my father.

This box of old books is now one of my most treasured possessions and I return to it regularly for inspiration.  It is a record of his life that he recorded and archived and I feel privileged to possess this box of history.  It occurred to me one time that if my dad had had access to the internet and to the opportunity to share these things with others through a wider medium then he would surely have been a blogger and because I hoped that in twenty or thirty year’s time my own children might like to know about me in the same way, but I don’t want to keep scrap books or written journals, then I decided that the appropriate modern equivalent to the scrap book would be through blog posts.

Ivan Petcher Sports Reporter

In this picture I am with my grandchildren, we are sitting on a beach in Greece and waiting for a boat to take us to the town of Corfu.

When I was a boy, we used to travel (not far and certainly not overseas – we didn’t even have a car) but we always had a family holiday and days out now and again.  These were important events because my dad had a passion for history and learning and so he shared his interests with me and inspired me in life to enjoy finding out about these places and to study.

Years later I had a family of my own and did the same things with my own children and now even more years later I have grandchildren and I want to introduce them to travel and history and to encourage them to do the same and so I record these events in my blog for them in the hope that one day they will discover it and it will give them some pleasure and inspiration.

My blog is about my travels, the places that I go, the things that I see and how these make me feel.  Writing about these travels has inspired me to read some of the classic travel writers and to gain inspiration from them.

This picture is taken in Kalami on Corfu and in the background of this picture is a white house, it doesn’t look much, it is a restaurant with some rooms above to rent, but this is the White House of Lawrence Durrell where he lived and worked in the 1930s and which is recorded in his book ‘Prospero’s Cell’.

It is conceited to imagine that I could ever produce a classic account of my travels but in the evenings as I sat on the balcony of the room and scribbled down my notes about the day I looked across to the White House and I imagined Lawrence Durrell sitting on his balcony and enjoying exactly the same view while searching for literary inspiration and discovering himself.