How to remember a trip through something other than photos

Everyone comes back with hundreds of photographs and revisits almost none of them. The things that genuinely return a trip years later tend to be small, physical and slightly random, and almost none of them are the things people set out to collect.

Buy something ordinary, not something local

The souvenir shop sells the idea of the place. The supermarket sells what people who live there actually use. Soap, toothpaste, a coffee, a snack, a brand of crisps that does not exist at home.

Ordinary objects carry the texture of a place far better than anything designed to represent it, because they were not designed to represent anything. They are also cheaper, they fit in a bag, and they do not look like a souvenir on a shelf a year later.

Collect one smell deliberately

A soap or a hand cream bought there and used only there works well, because you get daily exposure across the whole trip and no exposure afterwards. That combination is what forms a strong association rather than a vague one.

Hotel soap counts, and is free. The reason hotel soap is so evocative years later is that it satisfies both conditions by accident.

Write three lines at the end of each day

• One thing that happened that you did not plan
• One thing that was worse than expected, which is almost always funnier later
• One thing somebody said

Three lines takes ninety seconds and comprehensively outperforms a journal you abandon on day three. The unplanned things are the ones you will have forgotten entirely, and they are the ones worth having.

Do it at dinner rather than at bedtime. Bedtime entries do not get written on the days that were most worth writing about.

Keep the paper

Tickets, receipts, a menu, a boarding pass. Physical fragments have no interpretation attached, which is why finding one later returns the whole day at once in a way a curated photograph does not.

An envelope per trip is enough of a system. Anything more elaborate does not survive the second trip.