The Ancient Shudder

An Introduction

I remember the first time I felt what John Steinbeck described as ‘the ancient shudder’.

I came home from school one day to find a Khaki Land Rover, emblazoned with expedition stickers, parked on my parents' drive.

It belonged to John Michael – a family friend and National Geographic photographer – who was on his way to cross the Sahara Desert.

I was nine years old and hadn’t been further than Wales.

I have never forgotten wanting to hop in that Land Rover.

I pushed aside my Famous Five books for sheet maps and Wilfred Theisger.

Later, Jack Kerouac came along.

On the Road and Dharma Bums led me to Paul Bowles - an American writer living in Tangiers who wrote mesmerising evocations of the Sahara Desert.

I backpacked with my girlfriend (now wife) to Zagora, in Morocco, where civilisation runs out into the sand.

But still, the depths of the Sahara lay tantalisingly beyond reach.

As the years passed, I rode on horseback through the foothills of the Tien Shan mountains, climbed Mount Roraima in Venezuela, explored previously untrodden areas of the Greenland ice cap, hiked the Inca Trail, and climbed mountains in the Himalayas.

Some of these trips were pre-internet – sparsely documented, and taken using leave from my career as an advertising art director.

In 2020, just before the pandemic, I crossed Sudan’s Bayuda Desert by camel and pitched the story to SUITCASE Magazine on a whim.

An email landed in my inbox saying that SUITCASE wanted to publish the story in print.

After years of creating brands to develop their voices, I was excited to be finding my own.

When I went freelance, I enrolled in the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography course at LCC and started to take my photography and writing more seriously.

In 2022, I finally made it to the Sahara Desert and published the story in JRNY Magazine.

While I was in the Sahara, I made a photography project about ancient rock art that was shown at the Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition.

After years of helping brands develop their voices, I was excited to find my own.

Looking back, the journeys that defined me were the ones I made as a child – wandering the countryside in Shropshire, allowing nature to seep into every pore.

As much as I am lured by faraway places, I love ‘the faraway nearby’ (to borrow a phrase from Georgia O’Keefe) – the Peak District, where I live.

– Nick

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When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charlie