You know that feeling you get when you’re on holiday or travelling to a foreign country for the first time? Everything is new, you don’t understand a lot of it, and yet because of this you look a lot more closely at things. Living in a tourist town I sometimes see that look on the faces of visitors and have often thought how much I’d like to be able to see my own surroundings with the same freshness. This October I decided to do something about it.

It turns out to not be as hard as I thought. All I needed to do was stop thinking about having to be somewhere or doing something, and recognise that the walk itself was the being and doing in its own right. I stopped taking my hometown for granted and even discovered streets I’d never walked down, only a few blocks from my front door. I also discovered a surprising amount of extraordinary detail in my most common routes, not to mention the conversations I started having with complete strangers, all of whom have something surprising and delightful to tell you.

Contact strip of the day is the result of these daily walks across Brighton.