Travel journal

Travel journals are the stories of people in interesting places. They have become a bit cliched (predictable) because there was a period where so many people just wrote about the mountains, the weather and the food - basically the things that we would like to see lacking in a holiday in England. Travel journals become so all encompasing (and many guides still are) that they take away the excitement of being somewhere new because you already experienced it vicariously through the guide...
Modern writers now have to make their stories very specific - writing about something that isn't mountains and sunshine and everything else; but a specific music event, a particular meal beside the beach, spotting animals, a discussion of what the buildings look like, conversations they had or the place's history. Travel writing has become incredibly unique, narrow and imaginative whilst still being a true and persuasive account.
Read the start of Paul Carr's current article for The Guardian in which he opens describing how a hotel robs him of money, to then retell a story in which he finds himself locked outside of his hotel room - naked. We hardly find anything out about where he is but his stories make us want to go there.

Travel writing has evolved into something humoured and interesting, it's story telling whilst also drip feeding facts about the area without just listing them off (we know for instance the price of his hotel room, but because it is snook into the story and not just fired off as another fact you should know).

Your task this week is to think of  holiday and a particular moment that made it exciting, or a huge failure. Describe this in detail building tension whilst attempting to be informative too. This description of a single event might be all a reader needs to be convinced to go to or avoid your destination - and they will want to experience everything else for themselves and be surprised.

Acronym

Listen carefully to this song;



The initial letter of the lyrics all make up the word FEAR (eg for every-man a religion. Interestingly, the lyrics are all quite metaphorical and seem to be messages about life or morals. The example suggests that beliefs are individual and because of that, indisputable. They could each be used as proverbs. This is one of my favourite songs because of it's uniqueness. Some of my favourite lines are:

> Free expression as revolution
> For each a road

Your task is to read the lyrics online, then choose your own four or five letter word to use as an acronym for metaphors or your own proverbs. You should choose a powerful word like 'free', 'love', 'hate' etc. You should have a dictionary close by to help choose words for each letter of your word and see if you can come up with interesting sentences. Hopefully, you'll find this task very rewarding when you come across a proverb that strikes a chord with you.

Remember, if you start your own blog and post online I will give some feedback and hopefully others will too.

-3- Joseph Wright of Derby

Click for a much larger size

A travelling scientist is shown demonstrating the effects of a vacuum by withdrawing air from a flask containing a white cockatoo, though common birds like sparrows would normally have been used. Air pumps were developed in the 17th century and were relatively familiar by Wright's day. The artist's subject is not scientific invention, but a human drama in a night-time setting.

The bird will die if the demonstrator continues to deprive it of oxygen, and Wright leaves us in doubt as to whether or not the cockatoo will be reprieved. The painting reveals a wide range of individual reactions, from the frightened children, through the reflective philosopher, the excited interest of the youth on the left, to the indifferent young lovers concerned only with each other.

The figures are dramatically lit by a single candle, while in the window the moon appears. On the table in front of the candle is a glass containing a skull.


---Task---
Use this image as inspiration for your own short article. It might be a science journal entry, cold and observant over the experiment; or a diary entry from one of the observers; or a third person narrative of the event. You don't need to compose plot and twists, just explore feelings, describe the atmosphere, and create tension and mood.