Travelling has always brought me ideas. Not sure I’ve converted all of those ideas into actual material. But new places, new things, stories, legends, landscapes – all inspire new ideas.

In February I was in Oxford. Visiting museums, reading plaques on buildings, looking at deer and spotting birds. Going on walks in and around London is more than sufficient to fill up my ideas note book. Well, my ideas notebook is in my phone. I jot down ideas as I see things, take pictures and add annotations.

I was in Edinburgh this week, visiting castles, counting highland cows and looking for the loch monsters. The mountain called Ben Nevis, the war stories, the Scottish legends – all inspiring and thought provoking.

But ideas are the easy part of the writing. To create something in words, what I can visualise in my mind – that’s a different matter altogether. I tried to write snippets as I witnessed – but there is so much going on, that all I wanted to do was absorb. I didn’t want to write during the holidays.

Contrary to my trip to Sri Lanka in December, where I wrote everyday for an hour, the week long trip to Edinburgh filled my days and nights with new experiences. Now comes the hard part – convert those snippets, words, phrases and ideas into stories.

Visiting the writers’ museum and reading about R L Stevenson’s travels and finding Joy Cowley’s books in the Storytelling Centre’s bookshelves – all evidence of how writers are affected by travelling and how their writing travels.

Now that I am back to the grind, the day job and the regular writing schedules, it is important to bring the joy of discovering and the experience of travelling to the writing. It is important to see the world in all its glory – amongst lonely mountains and the bustle of a tourist city in the middle of a festival. It is important to be a child of the universe, learning from its colours and sounds. It is crucial for the writing to be spiced and enriched with the smells of the world and the flavours of the unknown. Embracing the unknown makes it your own.

So here I am, slowly backing my writing engine into the parking space. Here I am going to recollect the light on the mountains, the impatient rain, the smells of the freshly caught mussels and the taste of the shortbread and the lovingly pronounced Scottish accent.