thirty years of my life. From semi-circular chalk-cliff bays and closely cropped down land, to boggy marshes and copses of ash and beech, the Isle of Wight I've come to know through my coast-to-coast odyssey is yet another page of a book I've barely started, but which I plan to delve into as often as time permits.
And from whence has this sudden, somewhat late thirst for knowing and understanding the soil I grew up on come? Distance.
Distance by dint of living far from my roots, with perhaps just a hint of the foreign, to give the world I once knew a space and dimension far beyond its physical geography.
Most of us move around from time to time, and by physically moving greater and greater distances we assume we're travelling.
But movement doesn't necessarily imply travel; and conversely to travel doesn't mean you have to move a great distance. I've learnt that my own small birthplace offers a lifetime's worth of travel possibilities, with movement kept to a bare minimum.
And to find that grain of truth I needed to move, and therein lies the irony of it all.