It was only last week that I found myself staring at a few old photographs sent to me by a friend in England. These weren’t just any photos—oh no, these were the kind of relics that, when they land in your inbox, have the uncanny ability to make you feel both nostalgic and slightly nauseous.

The photos, apparently discovered in the loft by my friend’s daughter (who, naturally, asked, “Dad, who is this in the photo?” with all the horror of someone discovering a forgotten family member from a bygone era), date back to around 30 to 35 years ago.

Back when, believe it or not, I was an Englishman living in England, still remarkably unburdened by the weight of middle age, and sporting a physique that, let’s just say, hadn’t yet been conditioned by too much pršut!

The photos were taken during a trip to Cornwall, back when my Croatian wife and I were not yet married (ah, the wild and carefree days of pre-marital adventures). We had travelled down to the wilds of the English coast in a VW camper van that, frankly, looked more like a tin can on wheels than a reliable form of transportation.

We camped in a tent, because apparently we thought the best way to experience the great outdoors was to sleep on the ground and pretend we weren’t one emergency blanket away from contracting hypothermia.

And the whole thing? It looked like an audition for a 1970s film about Woodstock, with all the bohemian charm you could imagine.

Of course, in those days, we didn’t have the luxury of a mobile phone to document every passing moment of our lives.

That’s right, children, there was no "selfie culture"—no Instagram to post a photo of our tent or the slightly damp, saggy sleeping bags we fought over. No, we had to rely on these mysterious objects called cameras—those clunky, film-rolling devices that, when you took a picture, required a trip to the local chemist to develop the film and see if you’d managed to press the shutter button at all. If you were lucky, you got 36 chances to capture life, and you only realised how bad your shot was when the photos came back a week later.

And don’t even get me started on waiting to see how many embarrassing shots you had taken with your eyes half-closed.

Ah, the innocent bliss of pre-digital life. But I digress. The real revelation here is how young I looked. Not just younger in the way that people often say, “Oh, you’ve not changed a bit”—a sentiment that, frankly, you only hear from people who haven’t actually seen you in years—but young in the way that only people under 30 can appreciate. I

had the kind of energy that could only be summoned by a carefree world without social media to compare myself to everyone else. I wasn’t yet weighed down by existential dread about the future. The only real questions were whether I had packed enough snacks for the road and how soon I could get my hands on a pint of warm, flat beer after a long day of surfing.

But oh, how the world has changed since then.

Now, in 2024, I’m an expat living in Dubrovnik, where the sun never sets, the walls of the Old City remain forever Instagrammable, and everyone’s hair is more well-groomed than it has any right to be. Life has somehow turned from a series of spontaneous, off-the-cuff adventures to an endless stream of carefully curated posts, tagged memories, and algorithms designed to tell you what to wear, eat, and believe.

Who needs an AI-enhanced photo when your memories are etched in a far more meaningful way: the way we lived those moments, without needing to post them in real time or worry about whether they’d get enough likes?

What would I tell my 20-something-year-old self?

I suppose, in retrospect, I might say something like: “Buy some stock in Amazon, and for heaven’s sake.” But ultimately, perhaps I would tell myself the most important thing: Don’t take it all too seriously.

The world will throw a thousand shiny gadgets and AI breakthroughs at you, but it will still be the moments, the human connections, and the absurdity of it all that will make life worth living.

As Albert Einstein so wisely put it, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

Read more Englishman in Dubrovnik…well, if you really want to

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About the author

Mark Thomas (aka Englez u Dubrovniku) is the editor of The Dubrovnik Times. He was born and educated in the UK and moved to live in Dubrovnik in 1998. He works across a whole range of media, from a daily radio show to TV and in print. Thomas is fluent in Croatian and this column is available in Croatia on the website – Dubrovnik Vjesnik