On my travels one essential implement came with me for the ride. However small the backpack, even if all I actually carried for cooking was a kettle, it always tagged along. Just its mere presence conferred some special property on a journey and had the power to soothe. 

I have many black and white photographs from our travels in the early days - Ladle & Tent Pegs - a still life, one on every spool of film, pictures from anywhere I went - Harlech Castle, the Knossos in Crete, amongst the Stones at Avebury, Paris in the Spring, Provence, Switzerland, even Eritrea and Melton Mowbray... If you swapped them around I might find it hard to distinguish where each was taken after all these years. Perhaps it was these particular photographs, more than the views of the landmarks themselves, that gave me the hankering, at my age, to go gallivanting again. 

The ladle was a silent conspirator, back from my youth, urging just a few more miles, the next town, some further border, one last local recipe and another bowl licked clean. I longed once again for those decadent prowls through the markets for fruit and meat: is the skin the right colour, is there enough fat?  Satisfaction can be so easy when you've nothing else to distract your mind.