My walk home from my department building takes me about 30 minutes. Because of the geography of the city, the arrangement of its train lines and buildings it cannot be a direct route. I do enjoy the route, which involves me briefly ducking into the city and then out again. Yesterday though, I was forced to walk it differently. I often try and upset my own walking routes by making detours just for the hell of it. It is here in the moments outside of routine that we see things differently.

A few months ago one of my professors died quite suddenly and the loss is still being felt by the department. She was a keen artist and had apparently left behind some work that was freely available (and still is) to students who knew her. When I arrived at the office yesterday and was allowed access to the room I immediately saw the painting that I wanted. It was a painting that used to hang in her kitchen: a Moroccan vista of blues and yellows. I had asked her about its origins before and sadly I cannot remember her answers. Now in the room of paintings and books, I see the diversity of this person’s thoughts and feelings painted and sketched on paper. It was like being confronted with a library of someone’s life, written in a different language. Obviously personal, but at the same time indecipherable. In two weeks these paintings are all to be thrown away, and I felt a pang of sadness. I saved three paintings in total: the Moroccan vista, a colourful abstract piece and a dark gothic trip to the underworld. However, it didn’t feel right just taking the paintings. I mean, I know she wouldn’t mind me having them but I felt like I had to earn them. So I carried them home.

By the way I forgot to say that this Moroccan vista is a metre high and a metre and a half wide canvas. My journey took me about an hour. Stopping every so often to rest my shoulders, and leaning the painting up various structures in the city. A lamppost, a bus shelter, the bench outside the prison, a laundrette, traffic lights. People would walk past me keen to see what was on the canvas, others would have a look and quickly move on, worried that I might try and sell them it. This painting had been sat in a kitchen for a year and then moved to another room hidden behind other paintings. Now it had been seen by over a hundred people in an hour. People squeezing past me, children coming home from school and people in rush hour traffic queues.

When I finally got home, arms and shoulders aching, and slumped on the wall in front of my house, I felt that I had earned this painting. I had briefly shared it with others, I had proved that I wanted it, I had carried it here.

It sits behind me now as it did in that kitchen, a memory of a person and a walk.