I’m more emotionally attached to my passport than I should be. It’s partly because in the picture I’m seven years and one child younger and I was prescient enough to get a blow-dry before I went to the post office, so the shot is decent – so decent, in fact, that when coming directly off a 22-hour flight, immigration officials have more than once questioned if I’m actually the same person. (This is in stark contrast to my licence photo, for which I was less prepped and looks a lot like a Y2K-era celebrity mugshot after a DUI. And devastatingly, no police officer has ever questioned my identity regarding that particular document.) But mostly it’s because of the memories. This passport’s lifespan happens to have covered some of the most well-travelled years of my life, so when I take my seat on a plane and inevitably indulge in a quick flick before popping it away, the very first page takes me instantly back to a holiday my future husband and I took to Èze in the South of France while we were first falling in love, where we talked and played backgammon for hours on terraces heaving with bougainvillaea; I can almost taste the rosé (and feel the pash rash). That initial stamp was a good omen for what would eventually fill the pages to come, from the family road trip through Puglia where we drove straight from the airport to take the leap into the Grotta della Poesia, our first taste of Italy being a bracing smack to the face of the salty, deep blue waters of the Adriatic Sea, to the trip to Marrakech where a colleague and I got lost in the Medina for what felt like hours. Never has mint tea tasted quite so calming as when we finally found the light and our bearings and stumbled upon a familiar cafe.

I’m lucky enough to travel a lot. I’m travelling now, writing this from Kyoto in Japan, my legs in a steaming hot furo, laptop balanced precariously on a windowsill over the water. But many of us are (travelling a lot, I mean, not working from a Japanese hot tub) as experience starts to win out over consumption in the battle for our dollars. You can see this here in Japan, where ancient bridges heave under the weight of tourists all competing for that one iconic peaceful photo in a place that in reality no longer has anything peaceful about it, and everywhere else. Social media has changed the way we travel, turning it into a status game and forcing us to spend our time obsessively finding the place, hunting down the shot and getting the content, rather than just experiencing the thing. If I sound cantankerous it’s because I know I’m guilty, too. Just yesterday, for example, I took approximately 60 photos of temples that I have no intention of posting, and worse, will likely never once look at again. Getting my phone out in the face of something so beautiful was just second nature, but I could have left it in my bag and instead just lived the moment, instead of mostly seeing it through a screen.