A love letter to the holiday souvenir

‘An airline ticket to romantic places... Gardenia perfume lingering on a pillow.’ So said Eric Maschwitz in his wistful lyrics of the song These Foolish Things, which aptly distil what, for me, is the nostalgic allure of travel. And it’s evident in my Smythson Cosmic diary, where there may well be pressed gardenias and various BA boarding passes folded into its pages over its year-long travels.

A big part of my love of collecting various souvenirs and talismans from my trips is the transportive quality of taking you back to another time, another place. Or as Joan Didion succinctly declared in her essay On Keeping a Notebook, for the life-affirming gift it gives you of jolting you back to life ‘when the world seems drained of wonder’.

I confess to being a fairly analogue traveller – looking for romance in the real, not the digital, world – where I always take a disposable Kodak camera with me, in the hope that it will add a slightly sepia-tinted – and very much wishful thinking, here – Harley Weir-esque magic to my holiday snaps.

Hotel tote bags are another big love of mine, collected over trips which are like time capsules into where and what exactly I was doing that month; a particular favourite is one from the beach restaurant in Positano – Da Adolfo – which is still filled with sand, seashells, a pair of Manolo mules and a collection of some of my most-loved items of hotel paraphernalia. To clarify, I do not steal hotel pieces, but there is nothing like an Italian hotel beach towel or ashtray – special mention to Le Sirenuse, Villa d’Este and Il Pellicano for both – not to mention their hotel matches. (Equally old-school and fabulous are the more graphic deco box of matches from Claridge’s, which instantly conjure up the languid reverie of Martini time in its Fumoir.)

Apart from happy times in hotel bars, I seem to spend a lot of my time following ley lines and seeking out shrines and ruins, from temples in Egypt to pagodas in Vietnam, where I always like to make an offering of some kind. So I often travel with a box of Astier de Villatte incense, beautifully packaged in a slim Tiffany-blue box filled with delicately scented sticks sourced from the Japanese island of Awaji, where, for more than a thousand years, it has been made by the koh-shis, or masters of aroma. A forever favourite is the Palais d’Hiver variety, which is meant to evoke the scent of the tsarinas: an exuberance of musky patchouli mixed with the delicious perfume of white, waxy flowers. And seeing as it’s unlikely I will get to Russia any time soon, it extols a pure fantasy version of my imagined dreamscape of St Petersburg and the Romanovs. The perfume makers have all kinds of incense inspired by places from Kingston, Jamaica, to Buenos Aires, and a new one based on the island of Sao Tome and Principe, in which the heady aromas revolve around cocoa.

Aside from the hugely evocative power of scent, there’s a special sort of magic that ‘taste’ conjures up in vividly bringing a place back to life. Food is never just food; it’s a memory – a moment recaptured in a mouthful. Eating a madeleine will forever be like plunging into a forgotten Marcel Proust reverie. But, for my preferred temps perdus, the most evocative cake is a Tropézienne tart from Birley Bakery, which tastes like it’s been spritzed with Santa Maria Novella’s orange blossom water and exudes enough Françoise-Sagan-Bonjour-Tristesse 50s glamour to instantly take me on a faded-gingham romp through Pampelonne Beach.