Forget the fridge magnet, what are you bringing home?

Now, the things people bring home are often much less impressive.

A hotel key card. A paper menu from a tiny restaurant. A receipt from a café where the coffee was particularly good. A ticket stub. A matchbook. A coaster with the name of a bar you are certain you will forget, but somehow never do.

None of these things are really souvenirs. That is probably why they are so much better.

It is oddly satisfying to slip a hotel key card into a wallet and discovering it months later. You may not remember the room number, but you remember the place. The same goes for boarding passes, particularly the old paper ones that used to get folded into passports and stuffed into bags.

Menus have become particularly good souvenirs. Not the glossy ones from expensive restaurants, but the slightly battered piece of paper from the place you wandered into because it looked busy. Maybe there is still a stain on it from dinner. Maybe someone has scribbled a recommendation on the back. It tells you much more about a trip than a keychain ever could.

Then there are tote bags.

Somehow, every museum, bookshop, independent café and hotel now has one, and somehow there is always room for another. The tote bag is the souvenir for people who insist they do not buy souvenirs. It is practical enough to justify buying, but sentimental enough to make throwing it away feel vaguely criminal. Before long, the back of the bedroom door is covered in evidence of places visited and books purchased.

People collect cups too. Not necessarily deliberately. A particular café’s ceramic cup becomes memorable because the coffee was excellent, or because it was raining outside, or because the person sitting opposite said something funny. Eventually, the cup comes home. Suddenly the kitchen has acquired a very specific corner of someone’s travel history.

Even stones have their moment. A particularly beautiful pebble from a beach, a dried flower picked up on a walk, a shell from somewhere that is now thousands of kilometres away. There is no real reason to keep them, which is why they feel special maybe.

A fridge magnet tells you that someone went to Rome. A crumpled receipt might remind them of the tiny trattoria where they spent two hours talking. A hotel key card can bring back the feeling of waking up somewhere unfamiliar. A paper ticket can take you straight back to a rainy afternoon in another city.