The Slow Holiday: Why We're Swapping Screens for Notebooks This Summer
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from a holiday spent photographing it.
You find a beautiful view and reach for your phone. You eat something wonderful and document it before tasting it. You sit in a café that would be perfect for just sitting in, and instead you check whether anyone has liked the photo you posted twenty minutes ago of the café you were sitting in before this one.
You come home with a camera roll of two thousand images and the faint feeling that you weren't quite there for any of them.
This summer, we're making a different argument. Put the phone away - or at least, put it away more often than you usually do - and bring a notebook instead.
The Problem With Photographing Everything
Photography isn't the enemy. A good photograph captures something real - a face, a light, a moment - and it does it instantly and effortlessly. There's nothing wrong with wanting to remember.
But the camera roll has a way of replacing experience rather than recording it. When you photograph a moment, your brain registers that it's been saved - and subtly disengages from it. The memory is outsourced to the device. You were there, technically, but you weren't quite present.
Research backs this up. Studies on what's sometimes called the "photo-taking impairment effect" suggest that photographing objects and experiences can actually reduce how well we remember them - because the act of photographing signals to the brain that it doesn't need to do the work of encoding the memory itself.
Writing, it turns out, does the opposite.
What Writing Does That Photography Can't
When you write about an experience — even briefly, even imperfectly - you process it rather than just record it. You decide what mattered. You find the words for how something felt, which means you actually have to know how it felt. You notice details that a photograph would miss: the smell of the market, the sound of the street, the quality of the light at a specific hour that no camera setting quite captures.
A journal entry from a holiday twenty years ago will tell you more about who you were and what you felt than any photograph from the same trip. Not because it's more accurate - it isn't - but because it's more human. It contains a perspective, a voice, a moment of genuine attention.
That's what the slow holiday is really about. Not rejecting technology, but reclaiming attention. Choosing, at least occasionally, to be in the experience rather than documenting it.
What Slow Travel Actually Looks Like
The slow holiday doesn't have to mean two weeks in a remote cottage with no wifi. It's more a set of small, deliberate choices about how you spend your attention.
A notebook on the breakfast table instead of a phone. Ten minutes of writing before the day begins - where you are, what you can see, what you're looking forward to. It costs nothing and sets a different tone for the hours that follow.
One phone-free hour a day. Not a whole day, not forever. Just one hour, deliberately chosen, where the phone stays in the bag. A walk, a meal, an afternoon on the beach. You might be surprised by what you notice.
Writing instead of photographing one thing a day. Not instead of all photography - just one thing. The thing that struck you most. Describe it in a paragraph rather than capturing it in a frame. See what you find.
A postcard a day. The most underrated travel habit there is. Sitting down to write a postcard forces you to distil an experience into a few sentences - what was this day, really? - and sends something tangible to someone who will be genuinely pleased to receive it. Our correspondence collection has everything you need.
The Notebook as Travel Companion
A good travel notebook is one of the most useful things you can pack. Not because it's productive - though it can be - but because it becomes a record of the trip that's genuinely yours. Written in your hand, in your words, full of the things that mattered to you rather than the things that photographed well.
The best travel notebook is one that opens flat, so you can write on both pages without the spine fighting back. One that uses paper substantial enough to take ink from a fountain pen or a good rollerball without bleed-through. One small enough to fit in a bag without adding weight.
Our lay-flat A5 notebooks are designed with exactly this in mind - sewn binding, 100gsm paper, compact enough to go anywhere.
A Different Kind of Memory
Here's what you come home with from a slow holiday: fewer photographs, and more of the trip.
A notebook full of observations, half-formed thoughts, descriptions of things you ate and places you sat and conversations you half-overheard. A record that's imperfect and partial and completely yours. Something you can read again in ten years and be genuinely transported - not by a photograph of a view, but by a paragraph about how it felt to be standing in front of it.
That's the slow holiday. And this summer, we think it's worth trying.
Ready to pack your notebook? Browse our lay-flat notebooks, pens and correspondence collection - everything you need to slow down and pay attention this summer.