From drizzly Scotland to the Peruvian Amazon, founder Amy Cooper-Wright shares her life in travel with us, as we launch our new Travel Journal.
Where did your travel bug start?
I love travel so much, it’s really important to me and something I spend a lot of time researching and planning. When I was a kid we had a lot of family holidays visiting family in drizzly Scotland, so when I stayed with a French family in Corsica aged 12 and discovered the other way to holiday (with turquoise water and French food) I was hooked! At 17 I went on an expedition (without parents) to the Peruvian Amazon, as a student I spent a year in Martinique, and since having kids I take great pleasure in planning great holidays for my family, to create memories I know we will all hold onto for a very long time. We’ve sort of rediscovered Scotland in recent years and it is still my cherished motherland, but a hot holiday in August is non-negotiable for me!
You’ve spoken before about Michel de Montaigne’s Journal de Voyage. How did this affect the way you think about travel?
When I studied French and Philosophy at Oxford, I did a specialist paper on Michel de Montaigne, who wrote the sort of ’School of Life’ manuals of his day in his famous series of Essais, covering everything from death to travel. He also wrote a book called ‘Journal de Voyage’ where he explored the idea that to travel is to broaden your mind and ‘rub your brain up against those of others’ — a quote I love so much, because ‘rub up against’ suggests an element of friction and challenge, which is exactly what travel can feel like.
You are outside of your comfort zone, specially if you’re learning a new language, you are at times lost and confused. You are inevitably vulnerable and must trust in strangers, you are trying new things, tasting new foods, destined to get a bit lost along the way. If you love routines at home, you are forced to break out of that and challenge yourself to adapt to the new. Even though I love a routine, I also find these breaks from it incredibly refreshing and inspiring. Without them, during covid, I really struggled mentally, and it renewed my belief that its so important to travel, when you can, "in order to return home” as Montaigne said, "and see it in a new light."
Why did you want to develop a Mark+Fold Travel Journal?
As someone who loves a notebook, and who loves travel, a travel journal is extremely special to me. It’s the ultimate ‘empty vessel’ because you are setting off to embrace the unknown. You are forcing your brain to be more open to ideas, to really look around you, to listen, to smell and taste. You really do come back a changed person, even after a week, if you’ve had a new experience in a new place. I often picture those old travel chests and guitar cases you used to see, often in films and cartoons I suppose, where people had collected stickers from all the places they had been — there was something about the authenticity, the evidence of all those journeys, perhaps it even reminded me of the old toy Post Office! But that idea of collecting markers along the way, is really there in this idea of the pockets inside the Mark+Fold Travel Journal.
Lots of people have asked us over the years if we would do a travel journal, and we did the one for Takeo in 2019, so the idea has been percolating for a long time. And then we did a bit of research and found that actually there really aren’t that many good travel journals on the market, so we thought this was a nice opportunity for us to cater to that, building on all the best bits of our much-loved Notebooks. One of our most local customers said to me earlier this year that she often buys them as a gifts for friends when they go off travelling, so we decided this would be the year to give it a go!
Read more — Introducing the new Mark+Fold Travel Journals
