D’you want to go to the seaside?

I love photoalbums. In times where digitalism was not completely surrounding us I would develop many pictures and would have therefore many albums. All over my childhood and teenage years I spend hours and hours making my albums. This is something I learned from my mum. And I love it. However I am flooding myself with hundreds and hundreds of pictures each year and I hardly organise them in folders on my hard drive. Suddenly visual memories seem to disappear on our walls and our books.

However sometimes you do not need many pictures to reconstruct a feeling, a memory or a certain period of your life. Sometimes you do not need more than a little box.

I spent my last uni year on the English coast in East Sussex. Lovely part of the world. And no (!!) the weather is not always crap! It’s not always raining cats and dogs! They call it the sunshine coast and as ironic as it sounds when speaking of England, they are not wrong!

As a little goodbye present to a friend I created a box which summed up roughly our year spent over there. And in this case I did not use any personal picture to make it work as our own memory. I bought the little deck chairs and dishes in a shop specialised in doll houses. The rest were mainly magazines, fabric, postcards and left over tickets from bus drives or concerts.

When moving continents you can simply close your box and take it on the road with you to open it up again in your new home. My friend will hopefully keep this box for a while with her, keep carrying the sunshine coast to any place she wishes. The only thing this box cannot do is imitate the sound of seagulls!