POS to YYZ

I will be leaving tomorrow (Monday 19th September, 2005) for Canada and will be there for three weeks. At first I will not be updating the blog, but once I've settled in, I will update as usual from my new location.

These labels on the handle are over two decades old. They are from the time the choir and steel band of the high school I was at (S.A.G.H.S.) went to Canada on an exchange trip ( I was in the steelband playing high tenor).

About two years ago Daddy asked me to throw away this old suitcase. It had been up on top of a cupboard gathering dust for years. When I saw the labels on the handle, they looked so picturesque and intriguing to me that I started taking photos of them and the suitcase (one of those large 'old fashioned' hard carboardy ones) in different environments.

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The suitcase looked as though it would be an interesting piece around which to build a play or a film ... full of stories (actually it was full of winter clothes) . Some friends and I ended up going to Lopinot that day (Aisha, Michelle and Irum - visiting researchers/scholars) and I took photos of the suitcase on the banks of the river and in the river itself. At the time, I had not yet opened the case and didn't know that anything was in it ... so when I finally opened it on the banks of the river and saw that it contained anoraks, coats and my maternal grandfather's old fluffy winter hat, it looked quite surreal: winter clothes in suitcase on banks of river in tropics. I didn't know what I was going to do with the photos - but we all got the feeling that they were part of an unfolding story. In those photos, standing on a rock in the middle of the river, the suitcase looked like the symbol of a journey - one that twists and turns through the landscape of life, changing its shape through erosion as much as it does by bringing new things to build it up into a completely new design.

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Until we meet again, may our symbolic suitcases be filled with wellness, safety and great things. Keep checking the page. I will update when I can.

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Elspeth