Meaningful mementoes

When on holiday abroad, like many people, I would head for the souvenir shops and come home with stuff that were really not special at all. After a few years of such pointless purchases, I felt it worth the money to buy local craft, pottery, artwork or, being a bookaholic, books. Not big books because they would take up too much space in, besides adding unwanted weight to, my luggage. But little books with a unique attachment to the towns and sites I visited.

Places in England are particularly good at turning their literary heritage into meaningful mementoes. When in the Lake District in 1995, we took our son Amir (who was about nine years old then) to The World of Beatrix Potter at Bowness-on-Windermere, Cumbria. To remind us of our trip, I bought Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other stories in the series, reproduced with the original pictures.

On the same trip, we also stopped by at Keswick and I went away with this beautiful book of poetry.

This anthology celebrates "the powerful beauty of the Lake District's landscape" with poems by England's Romantic poets, including Wordsworth, Keats and Byron, which are matched with photographs by Rob Talbot and paintings by contemporary artists. 

On an earlier trip to England, in 1991, when we had driven through another part of the country, these two little books, A Shakespeare Treasury and Winston Churchill: Wit and Wisdom, were my souvenirs of two places we went to - Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare, and Blenheim Palace, where Sir Winston was born.

Now, decades later and in a new century, I would sometimes take out these books, read them and remember those times and places.