I’m a magpie. Challenge me to weave through a souk without pawing at mismatched crockery and curly-toed shoes I’ll, of course, never wear back home, and I’ll fail miserably. You’d have to blinker me like a racehorse, and, believe me, my boyfriend has tried.
On my first ‘adult’ holiday, I returned from Tunisia with swollen socks cocooning the individual dishes that collectively made up a supposedly hand-painted chip-and-dip shaped like a Hamsa hand. It was a cringingly clichéd memento, a whisker away from the billowy harem pants my gap-year friends would soon be bringing back from India and Bali. I like to think I’ve refined my taste since then, but one thing has remained constant: travelling abroad means I’ll always be on the lookout for something to bring home. Something that, when I’m fumbling my way to the coffee machine in the early morning, my bleary eyes can land on — a cup, a bowl, a too-small pinch pot — that reminds me my life doesn’t revolve entirely around work. That there is an expansive world beyond my tiny London flat.
