#ThrowbackThursday - where we were on this date in Aprils past

I have enjoyed joining in #ThrowbackThursday on Twitter

Shadows Of The Wanderer by Ana Pacheco 

for ages now, but it only recently occurred to me that I could do a similar feature on my blog. For those of you who haven't come across the hashtag before, the idea is to look back across the years and reminisce about what you were doing on the same date. Stephanie Jane (the blog) has been around since 2013 and I have posts on Theatrical Eastbourne back to 2012 so let's see what we were up to! All links go to my old posts, so do click through for the full story, and if you write your own #ThrowbackThursday post, pop the link in the Comments!

At the end of April 2012 I had just visited a Willie Doherty photographic and video exhibition at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne. Doherty is from Northern Ireland and much of his work is an attempt to understand the daily fear, oppression and uncertainty of people living within a divided community. I liked the ambiguity of his work and several of the photographs got more frightening the longer I observed and thought about them.

A year later and April 2013 was all about the theatre. We

had returned from a fortnight's holiday in Austin, Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana, to cold, grey, miserable England in March. Wearing all our clothing (not quite!) for two days while we tried to get the house back up to temperature was the genesis of our travelling idea - no more British winters! - but in the meantime I consoled myself with a cultural overload: three plays, a musical, a film, a storytelling workshop and an incredible Matthew Bourne ballet.

At the end of April 2014 we had been home a month from

Books to read! 

our first European caravan travels - six months around Portugal and Spain - and I started what would become a frantic ebaying and freegling of everything in our house that wasn't actually bolted to the walls! We hadn't yet decided to sell up and embrace the nomadic life full-time, but I remember feeling claustrophobic back indoors and this was exacerbated by the sheer amount of stuff I had accumulated over the years. I didn't have a job to return to either so the clearout helped with cashflow. I still had reading time though so April 2014's memory is a roundup post of six book reviews.

This time last year we had been on the road for nearly

eight months and were beginning our UK summer tour. The end of April saw us in Norwich admiring the Ana Pacheco sculpture Shadows Of The Wanderer at Norwich Cathedral (pictured at the top of this post), buying local produce at the permanent market, and visiting a couple of excellent eateries. Dave found his very own Place too!

I've loved looking back over the past few years and am still amazed at how much we have changed our lives. I'll do another #ThrowbackThursday post at the end of next month remembering that date in years gone by.